II. Searching...
III. Evaluating...
IV. Researching...
You've heard, or will hear, your college professors firmly warn against plagiariam, the use of another's words or ideas without properly crediting them in your bibliography or list of works cited. Giving credit where credit is due is no less important just because the source you used is an electronic, paperless gadget called the Internet. Even if you never lay hands on the physical, original paper copy (if there ever was a print version), you must always include for your instructor complete information about the sources you used. You accomplish this through using a "citation" in your list of works cited (as known as your bibliography).
Citations must include certain prescribed information about your source and be in a specific order with specific punctuation. How citations should be formatted are described in "style" manuals. The two most popular styles for citations here at USC Lancaster are the MLA style and the APA style. (Usually, MLA is used in arts and humanities courses, while APA is used in science and social science sources. Your professor will usually tell you which style to use.)
If your source is a print source, there are prescribed ways to cite that
resource. See our Web page on Citing
Print Sources in the Medford
Library Tutorial for more information. Just to show an example here,
if you wrote a paper about using the Internet for research, you might
have used a book entitled Electronic styles: A Handbook for citing
electronic information. In your list of works cited, you
would have included a citation such as the following:
| Li, Xia and Nancy B. Crane. Electronic styles: A Handbook for citing electronic information. 2nd ed. Medford, NJ: Information Today, 1996. |
You will find, though, that the information you need and the format you
use for citing an electronic source
varies from the typical book citation such as the one above.
Some of the extra information you'll need for your citation of an electronic source may include:
the Web page title (which is not always easily distinguishable)
| Here is a sample citation
for a webpage, using the MLA style:
Portuguese Language Page. U of Chicago. 1 May 1997 <http://humanities.uchicago.edu/romance/port/>. Notice that May 1 1997 is the date of access and the URL is included. University of Chicago is the sponsoring agency. |
Go to each of these two sites and look closely at the examples of
citations for electronic resources, then return to the tutorial:
APA
Style Guidelines (see both "General Forms for Electronic References"
and "Reference Examples for Electronic Source
Materials") |
Continue now with the
tutorial
by clicking on the underlined link in
this sentence.
