The primary reason why you need to cite your sources is so that you can give proper credit to the original author or creator and avoid any charges of plagiarism.
Other reasons for citing your resources include:
Plagiarism is using another person's words or ideas in your work without clearly acknowledging or crediting the original source of the information.
You must give credit whenever you use:
In most cases, plagiarism is an accident that happens because someone is not aware of their responsibility to cite certain pieces of information from other people. When in doubt, cite it!
Some databases will automatically generate a citation for you in a variety of different styles (e.g. APA), but be careful. Some of these citations may contain mistakes so it's still up to you to review them for accuracy.
Find the article that you want to cite and then:
Be sure to select the appropriate style, e.g. APA, when copying and pasting.
At the present time, PubMed does not automatically generate citations for the articles in the database. The easiest work around for this is to look up the article you want to cite in Google Scholar and then follow the steps below for automatically generating a citation.
Find the article you want and then:
Be sure to select the appropriate style, e.g. APA, when copying and pasting.
There will be times when you have to create a citation for an article/website/book/etc. from scratch. The How Do I Cite that with APA guide will walk you through the steps required to create accurate citations for most of the sources you will run into during your research.
Additional Resources to Check
Citation management programs, like EndNote and Zotero, make research a whole lot easier. How? Here are a couple of reasons:
Programs like EndNote aren't perfect. You still have to check to make sure things are properly formatted, but they can save a great deal of time. Click the links below to learn more about each program.
EndNote is a citation management program that you load on to your computer. There is an online component to it called EndNote Web, but you can only use it after you have loaded the regular EndNote program on your computer and created an account.
Check out the EndNote and EndNote Online guide for more information about how to use EndNote.
Zotero is another citation management program that can either be installed on your computer or, if you're a Firefox user, plugged directly into Firefox. You can also easily share citations using a Zotero group.
Check out the Zotero User's Guide for more information about how to use Zotero.
Mendeley is another citation management program that allows users to manage and share research papers, discover research data, and collaborate online. Like EndNote and Zotero, it interfaces with Microsoft Word to produce citations and bibliographies.
Check out the Mendeley User's Guide for more information on how to use Mendeley.