Undergraduate Student Research Program

There are many reasons why citing sources is important. Here are three compelling reasons:

1. Not providing citations is plagiarism, which can carry big academic consequences. Learn more about plagiarism.
2. It is respectful to the authors whose information you are using. Think about it this way: You write a really awesome blog post about something you are truly passionate about and have spent much time developing. Then someone else on the Internet copies your post and passes it off as their own ideas (aka. they didn't cite you). This is very disrespectful to you, your time and effort, and your ideas.
3. It helps your readers - often your professor - find your sources quickly so they can learn more about your topic. Specific formats, like APA or MLA, provide a common language for making this possible.

The majority of the Library's databases, including OneSearch and EBSCO databases, have built-in citation generators. These help you to easily retrieve citations for your sources. Both Google Scholar and PubMed Central also have citation generators.

Note: Always consider the citations you pull from any citation generator to be drafts. You should review the citation for accuracy. You may need to fix spacing, indentation, capitalization, the number of authors listed in the citation, and URLs or DOIs. If you are using APA, for example, a common error is that the citation generator will capitalize every word in the article's title. Instead, APA using sentence case, where you capitalize only the first words of titles and subtitles and proper nouns.

Once you've selected an article, look for the "Cite" tool. In some databases, including Google Scholar and Natural Science Collection, this looks like a quotation marks (" ") icon. In others, it will say "Cite."