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Creating Citations & Avoiding Plagiarism

What are citations?

Citations are addresses. They tell readers where to find a specific piece of research.

Think of a postal address. There are certain pieces of information that must be included and they must be presented in a certain order (format) so that a letter can find its destination. Postal addresses may vary slightly in different countries or regions, but in the end they all contain the same pieces of critical information. This can be compared to the slightly varied formats of different style guides for citations.

Citations provide basic information like author, title, publisher and year of publication that allow researchers to locate a particular piece of information.

Why are citations needed?

When we use someone else's ideas, we use citations to tell others exactly where that idea came from.

Beyond giving someone else credit for their ideas (attribution), citations are critical for scholarly communication and knowledge creation because they allow researchers to trace the origins of and development of ideas over time.

How to write citations?

Just like addresses, citations have a very specific format, and different academic disciplines may have slightly different ways that they format citations; adopting the format from one of several style-guides.

Please note: FoB uses APA-style citations and FoAD uses Chicago-style citations.

APA

APA-style citations are outlined in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association: the Official Guide to APA Style, but the basic format is as follows:

Surname of Author(s), Initial of first name of Author(s).(Year of Publication). Title (Edition No.). Publisher. URL
Basic Example
Maesse, J., Pühringer, S., Rossier, T., & Benz, P. (Eds.). (2021). Power and influence of economists: Contributions to the social studies of economics (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367817084
Further Examples

Chicago

Chicago-style is outlined in The Chicago Manual of Style, but the basic format is as follows:

Surname of Author(s), First name of Author(s). Title. Publisher, Year of Publication. URL.
Basic Example
Hauke, Petra, Karen Latimer, and Robert Niess, eds. New Libraries in Old Buildings: Creative Reuse. De Gruyter, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110679663.
Further Examples

Plagiarism

What is plagiarism?1

Plagiarism means presenting someone else’s work, or your own previous work in the case of self-plagiarism, as your own. Plagiarism is intellectual theft and is regarded as academic misconduct.

Types of plagiarism1

There are different types of plagiarism and all are serious violations of academic honesty.

  • Direct plagiarism: the word-for-word transcription of part of someone else’s work, without attribution and without quotation marks.
  • Mosaic Plagiarism occurs when a student borrows phrases from a source without using quotation marks, or finds synonyms for the author’s language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original.
  • Self-plagiarism occurs when a student submits his or her own previous work, or mixes parts of previous works. 
  • Accidental plagiarism occurs when a person neglects to cite their sources or unintentionally paraphrases a source by using similar words, groups of words without attribution.

Avoiding plagiarism1

Plagiarism can be committed unintentionally. Make sure you always provide proper source references so that others can see which ideas are those of other authors.

Providing proper source references also enables other people to check these sources.

Additional Resources

Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab)

The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University in the US has been online since 1995 and is one of the most comprehensive sources available regarding style and citation. Indeed, it often has more information than the actual style guides due to the large number of examples available.

Citation Generators

If you have the information about an article or book, you can use one of the tools below to put it in the right format.

1Based on a University Library Groningen publication on http://libguides.rug.nl/.

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