Understanding Citations   Tags: books, citations, citing_sources, in_text, works_cited  

In colleges and universities it is expected that you will cite your sources of information correctly.

There are three main reasons why you must cite clearly, systematically and consistently:

• If you include the work or ideas of others without citing it, this is plagiarism. 
• A well-cited piece of work demonstrates to your professor that you have thoroughly researched the topic, and that your work is based on evidence.
• Readers of your work may wish to look at the external information you have referred to in your writing, so readers will need full details of the source to locate it.

Welcome to the Understanding Citations Guide at NJIT.  This guide was designed to help you read citations and create citations for your own research papers.

Our favorite citation website is The OWL at Purdue.

After watching this video, you should be able to:

• Identify the elements of citations
• Distinguish between citations for books, book chapters, and journal articles
• Recognize citation style names
• Describe the purpose of an in-text citation and how it refers to the works cited page.

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Created by the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL), this lays out proper citation formats (MLA, APA, CMS) in an easy to read, downloadable citation style chart.

This is also accessible online here.