If you want help with in-text citation and your works cited or reference section, contact the Writing Center.
If you need quick information about citation styles, a style manual, or a link to the Perdue OWL or another citation guide, the library has a Citation Guide HERE.
If you aren't sure which citation style to use for a paper, check your syllabus or the assignment sheet for the paper or ask your professor what style they prefer you use.
Because when you cite your sources correctly, you avoid unintentional plagiarism.
Citing your work is when you clearly indicate in your paper where you got information and who you got it from. You are essentially saying, "this idea isn't mine; it belongs to this person, and this is where I found it."
Plagiarism is when you pretend someone else's words or ideas are your own. It's anywhere you should say, "this idea isn't mine; it belongs to this person, and this is where I found it" and do not.
Some examples of plagiarism:
The Wilmington College Student handbook considers plagiarism to be academic misconduct, and defines Plagiarism as:
Submitting work done wholly or partly by another, including the unattributed copying of all or parts of a published work or internet document. Using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) sources to produce work (when not expressly permitted) is also a form of plagiarism. Some instances of plagiarism are the result of ignorance rather than dishonesty. When plagiarism is encountered, the instructor should be sure that the student knows proper procedures for attributing content.
Citing your sources and quoting from your sources are two related, but distinctly different things:
Citing sources is when you indicate where you got a piece of information and who the author is. You are essentially saying, "this idea isn't mine; it belongs to this person, and this is where I found it." When you cite, you do not use the exact words the source used - you restate the information in your own words, and provide a citation to indicate where you got the information.
Quoting sources is when you include a section of the original work in your own. You must use the exact wording your source used and provide a citation to indicate where you got the quote from (otherwise you are plagiarizing!). Quoting should be used only when including the exact wording from the original source is important - usually it is better to use your own words.
Examples:
Citing a source:
The other theory proposed by the wild animals authorship camp agrees that Shakespeare was not the author of the plays attributed to him, but rejects the idea that author was a raccoon on the basis of raccoons being a new world animal. This theory instead argues that one or more monkeys were the authors (Smith, 2021 p.27-29).
Quoting from a source:
Smith argues that instead of raccoons, "the truest author of our greatest plays and sonnets was, or rather were, three monkeys in a trenchcoat" (2021, p. 28), even though trenchcoats were not common in Elizabethan England.
Generative AI can be a useful tool for brainstorming, organizing your thoughts, and even some writing - but you need to be careful how you use it, because it can easily become a tool for plagiarism. (If you have an AI write your paper, you'll be passing off someone else's work as your own, which makes it plagiarism. Yes, even if the "someone else" is a computer.)
It's also important to understand what generative AI does, and does not, "know" how to do. AI aren't all-knowing, and they aren't searching the internet for answers as they go - they can only answer questions based on the information they got as training data.
But AI are more than happy to make up articles and even citations that look right, and will then even insist to you that they are real.
This is AI Hallucination.
So be very cautious of information you get from an AI, even if it hands you really nice looking citations to go with it, and always verify information and citations yourself.
The library has more AI information and resources on our Artificial Intelligence page.