A colleague of mine once told me a story that proves how small the academic world can be while underscoring the best reason to document sources: Doing so can only make you friends; failing to do so can only make you enemies. This colleague was asked to review a proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation, and was irate when he realized that an author of the proposal did not acknowledge my colleague’s work when he clearly should have. An investigation confirmed my colleague’s suspicions, which stung all the more because he had once actually nominated the author for an award. For my colleague, the author, and the National Science Foundation, this became an unpleasant situation all around, breeding distrust and embarrassment. A lot of time was wasted. All of this could have been avoided if the author had merely put his research into the appropriate context by properly acknowledging his sources. Instead, the author——whether intentionally or not——plagiarized.

When you write papers, you might be tempted to plagiarize to try to cover up the fact that almost all of your paper came directly from sources. Your well-read professors will not be fooled by this tactic, though, and part of your job as a researcher and writer is to organize, assimilate, and recast your information in your own form. If you find yourself doing such things as using the same source for several paragraphs in a row or failing even to provide your own topic sentences for paragraphs, you are obviously not doing your job as a thinking writer. Do not fall back on the flimsy excuse that you might as well just copy it exactly as it appeared because you see no way to phrase it any better than the original author did. The context for your writing is different from the context of the original. The reason you use sources in the first place is to simplify and summarize information and weave it into the pattern of your own ideas, and your pattern of ideas will develop as you write and do your research.

Also, you must remember that the type of writing you do rarely relies on direct quotations, because the author’s exact wording is generally not as relevant as the data reported. In a technical paper on mine safety, for example, direct quotation of these sentences is probably inappropriate: "Since 1870, 121,000 mining deaths have occurred; 1.7 million lost-time injuries have been recorded since 1930. All of this has contributed to the public’s negative perception of mining and the NIMBY mentality." There is probably no good reason to quote these sentences directly, especially because some of the material is data and some is interpretation. The exact wording does not matter, but some of the material does, so the writer’s job is to extract only the relevant information, use it, and cite the source. Similarly, there is no good reason to quote this sentence directly: "Acid mine drainage has been and continues to be a major problem generated by the mining of coal in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the world." In this instance, the information is so general that it need not even be cited, but neither should the sentence itself just be lifted out and plopped into your paper. Ideally, the information from the above sentence would simply end up as an inherent part of a sentence of your own creation such as this one: "This paper explores the three chief reasons why acid mine drainage continues to be a major environmental problem in Pennsylvania."

In sum then, follow these fundamental rules as you use sources:

• Summarize and simplify the most relevant information from your sources.
• Let your research influence——but not control entirely——your thinking and writing process.
• Integrate your sources efficiently within the context of your own work.
• When appropriate, document your sources.

Information that always must be cited includes:

• Quotations, opinions, and predictions——whether directly quoted or paraphrased.
• Statistics derived by the original author.
• Visuals in the original.
• Another author’s theories.
• Case studies.
• Another author’s direct experimental methods or results.
• Another author’s unique research procedures or findings.

If you use specific information of the type just mentioned, document it; otherwise you could be plagiarizing. Better safe than lazy. By citing the source of your information you point to an authority rather than ask your reader to trust your memory or what might appear to be your own idea. Even though you can recall a statistic or a description of a process, for example, citation of such information——if it truly came directly from a source——gives more credibility to your writing and assures both you and your reader of the accuracy, timeliness, and even the potential bias or limitedness of your information. You know whether or not you looked at a source to get the information originally, and so does your intelligent reader. It is your job to take careful notes from your sources as you review them and document your sources accurately so that they provide underpinnings for your overall work. If possible, track down the original sources rather than repeat another author’s interpretation second-hand, and only cite sources that you have actually read and used. Be honest, smart, and safe.

This section details ways for you to integrate your sources into your own work. It is easy to feel at times that you have done so much research that you are simply spitting back various ideas that others formulated. That is why it is important for you to develop your own assertions where possible, organize your findings in such a way that your ideas are still the thrust of the paper, and take care not to rely too much on any one source, or you will find that your paper’s content is controlled too heavily by that source.

In practical terms, some ways to develop and back up your assertions include:

• Organize your sources before and as you write so that they BLEND, even within paragraphs. Your paper——on both the overall level and the paragraph level——should reveal relationships among your sources, and should also reveal the relationships between your own ideas and those of your sources.
• As much as is practical, make the paper’s INTRODUCTION and CONCLUSION your own ideas or your own synthesis of the ideas inherent in your research. Use sources minimally in your introduction and conclusion.
• In general, use the OPENINGS AND CLOSINGS OF YOUR PARAGRAPHS to reveal your work——"enclose" your sources among your assertions. At a minimum, make your own topic sentences and wrap-up sentences for paragraphs.
• When appropriate, practice such RHETORICAL STRATEGIES as analysis, synthesis, comparison, contrast, summary, description, definition, evaluation, hypothesis, generalization, classification, hierarchical structure, and even narration. Prove to your reader that you are thinking as you write.

Another vital practice is making it clear exactly where your own ideas end and the cited information begins. It is your job to help your reader draw the line between these two things, often by the way you word the opening part of your cited information. A phrase such as "A 1979 study revealed that" is an obvious announcement of documentation to come. Another recommended technique is the insertion of the author’s name right into the text to announce the beginning of your cited information. You may worry that you are not allowed to give the actual names of the researchers you have studied in the paper’s text, but just the opposite is true. In fact, the more respectable an author you cite, the more impressed your reader will be with your material while reading. If you note that the source is NASA or Carl Sagan or The Wall Street Journal right in your text, it will have a more profound effect on the readers than if you make them guess or flip to the References page to look up the source.

What follows is an excerpt from a political science paper that simply and admirably draws the line between writer and cited information:

Note how the writer begins by redefining her previous paragraph’s topic (political upheaval), then connects this to Iran’s hatred of foreign interference, then suggests a causal relationship and ties everything into John Limbert’s analysis——thereby announcing that a synthesis of Limbert’s work is coming. This writer’s work also becomes more credible and meaningful because, right in the text, she announces the name of a person who is a recognized authority in the field. Even in this short excerpt, it is obvious that this writer is using proper documentation and backing up her own assertions with confidence and style.

Writing a paragraph with the sources properly cited can seem a tricky task at first, but the process is straightforward enough, especially when we analyze an example. Writing and documenting a paragraph is really just a matter of thinking clearly about a topic you have researched and transferring that thinking to the page. To illustrate, a tidy sample paragraph follows, with the sources properly documented in the author-year system, Next, the genesis of the paragraph is analyzed through the author’s eyes.

Now let us walk through the paragraph and its use of sources. The first two sentences of the paragraph assert the author’s personal view about the value of the world’s species (a view shaped by his research, no doubt), which he is about to back up by using three recent sources. Next, the author cited a source (Myers) which had included a statistic ("over 60 percent of the purchases we make at the pharmacy"). Without this source cited, the reader could easily believe that the author estimated loosely or simply relied on his memory for the statistic. The next source cited (Wilson) involved a sweeping and general claim that the author of the above paragraph derived from a textbook he had read. The author was at first not sure whether to cite the source, but he wisely decided that he should because he realized that he had in fact had Wilson’s book open to a particular page and referred to it as he wrote the sentence. The next source (Ehrlich) was cited because the author had gone through a whole chapter of Ehrlich’s book in order to write the sentence, usually using Ehrlich’s exact section headings from the chapter as the sentence material. The final examples of the salmon and the butterfly were based directly on the author’s personal experience of working at a fish hatchery for a summer, so documenting sources was not an issue. The fact that the author found a way to tie this experiential knowledge in with his research is testimony to the fact that he was thinking as he wrote the paragraph. He allowed his sources to blend with each other, but he did not allow them to do the thinking for him. More evidence of the author’s control over his material is his mid-paragraph transition sentence (beginning with "Furthermore"), his labeling of species as "barometers" of the environment a few sentences later, and his closing sentence, which wraps up the paragraph’s ideas neatly by making a general affirmative and confident statement.

Not every paragraph should look exactly like this, of course, but every paragraph should be written with the same kind of care about how, when, and why the sources are documented.

In science and engineering, the author-year system of documentation is used more on the undergraduate level than the graduate. Fields that have ties to the liberal arts, such as geography, human development, and political science, tend to favor the author-year system.

Your basic job when using this system is to indicate right in the text——in parentheses——the author(s) and year of publication of the reference you are citing. Since the citation becomes part of your sentence, you delay the appropriate punctuation until after the parentheses.

In the following example, both the author and year are given in parentheses:

Many writers identify the source as soon as they begin the reference, including the author’s name directly in the text and supplying only the year in parentheses:

If you use two or more articles written by the same author(s) in the same year, you distinguish between the documents in your text and on your References page by using an "a,b,c" system, providing an identifying letter after the year:

If no author’s name is given in the original, the publication’s name or the publisher’s name (or a clear shortened form of it) should suffice. In the following example, a document authored by a governmental agency (which would be fully referenced on a References page) is identified by a shortened form of its name:

Style For The References Page——Author-Year System

You enable your reader to locate the original sources of your documented information by using a separate References page at the end of your text. You could, of course, choose any respected magazine or journal in your field as a model for your References page, and this is often the easiest path to take.

As a general rule, on your References page you provide the following information in the following order:

• The names and initials of all authors, beginning with the last name of the first author listed, followed by a comma.
• Year of publication, followed by a colon.
• Title of the document or article being cited, with the key words capitalized. Quotation marks could be used around article titles.
• Title of book, magazine, or journal, underlined or italicized, with journal titles abbreviated.
• Publication information——if citing a BOOK or PRIVATELY PUBLISHED DOCUMENT, provide the publisher’s name and location, then the total number of pages, separated by commas; if citing a JOURNAL or MAGAZINE, provide the volume number in boldface, then a comma, then the page numbers of the article being cited.

Especially when you are referring to things such as government documents, statistical reports, and unsigned magazine articles, exact authorship can seem a difficult thing to determine. In brief, publications of an organization are considered to be authored by that organization. If no author’s name is identified, do not use the word "Anonymous" as the author’s name; instead, if the U.S. Department of Commerce or the name of a company is the only author identified on the publication, consider that organization to be the author. If you interviewed or received written correspondence as part of your research, list the person’s name, affiliation, and any relevant dates. Remember that the general rule is to provide enough information so that your readers can obtain copies of your references if they wish. Where appropriate, you might even provide a mailing address.

In the author-year system, your references are listed on a separate References page in alphabetical order, using the last names of the authors. The type should be double spaced, lines should not be skipped between each reference, and a hanging indent of five spaces should be used after the first line of each reference.

Always include the word "References," boldfaced if possible, in the center at the top of the page. An example follows:

Generally, the number system is favored in fields where you typically report experimental work that was completed in a laboratory. Technical fields such as materials science, aerospace engineering, and biology tend to favor the number system.

When you use the Number system, your basic job is to indicate in your text——either in parentheses or brackets——a number that corresponds to a source on your References page. The first source you cite in your text receives the number 1, the second number 2, and so on. If you repeat a reference to a source later in the text, it retains its original number: thus all references to source number 4 will receive a 4 after them in parentheses or brackets. You delay the appropriate punctuation until after the parentheses or brackets.

What follows is a typical example of the use of the number system:

Many authors prefer to identify the source at the beginning of the reference, perhaps including the author’s name directly in the text:

The number system is especially handy for citing equations, because you can simply insert the citation number logically as you introduce the equation to avoid confusion with any other numbers:

You enable your reader to locate the original sources of your documented information by using a separate References page at the end of your text. You could simply choose a respected journal in your field and use this as a model for your References page.

As a general rule, on your References page you provide the following information in the following order:

• The number of the reference, followed by a period.
• The initials and last names of all authors, followed by a comma.
• Title of the article enclosed in quotation marks, followed by a comma.
• Title of book, magazine, or journal, underlined or italicized, with journal titles abbreviated.
• Volume numbers or editors——if citing a JOURNAL or MAGAZINE, provide the volume number in boldface, followed by the issue number in brackets; if citing a BOOK with editors or volume numbers, provide the names of the editors or the volume numbers.
• Publication information——if citing a BOOK or PRIVATELY PUBLISHED DOCUMENT, provide the relevant page numbers, then the publisher’s name and location (all separated by commas), then the year, followed by a period; if citing a JOURNAL or MAGAZINE, provide the relevant page numbers of the article being cited, then the year in parentheses, followed by a period.

Especially when you are referring to things such as government documents, statistical reports, and unsigned magazine articles, exact authorship can seem a difficult thing to determine. In brief, publications of an organization are considered to be authored by that organization. If no author’s name is identified, do not use the word "Anonymous" as the author’s name; instead, if the National Research Council of Canada or the name of a company is the only author identified on the publication, consider that organization to be the author. Remember that the general rule is to provide enough information so that your readers can obtain copies of your references if they wish. Where appropriate, you might even provide a mailing address.

In the Number system your references are listed on a separate References page in the order in which they were cited by first appearance in your text, and they are numbered accordingly. Each source is, of course, simply listed once, even though it may have been referred to in the text numerous times. The type should be double spaced, lines should not be skipped between each reference, and a hanging indent of five spaces should be used after the first line of each reference. Always include the word "References," boldfaced if possible, in the center at the top of the page. An example follows: