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Citing Your Sources
When to Cite Your Sources
Taking Notes Electronically
Citation Styles
MLA Style
APA Style
Quiz

When to Cite Your Sources

The Dartmouth Guide mentioned in the previous section gives essential guidelines on citing sources:

• Cite sources for all verbatim quotations of two or more consecutive words. Exact wording, or even a single distinctive word, taken from a source should be placed in quotation marks.

• Cite sources from which you paraphrase or summarize facts or ideas. Whenever you rely on another's information or ideas, you should cite your source, even if you do not use a verbatim
  quotation.

• Cite sources for materials that you might not normally consider as "texts" because they are not written (like musical compositions, films, audio or visual tapes, works of art, maps, Web pages, statistical tables, or electronic databases).
  Sources © 1998 Dartmouth College http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sources/about/why.html

When doing research you must document the sources used in your paper. You document these sources by creating notes (footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical references) and by creating a bibliography (or works cited list) which lists the sources used in the paper. Your readers should be able to determine the sources of your information and verify its accuracy.

The next section will describe a process for taking notes and documenting sources used in your research.