Citation
There are dozens of different formats for citing sources, such as MLA, APA, and Chicago. We’re not going into the specifics of each one. It is the responsibility of your instructor to decide on the citation format expected for your assignments, and it is your responsibility to inform yourself on that format and stick with it throughout each assignment. Guides to specific citation styles can be found through the University Libraries, as well as through tools like the Purdue Owl.
Text
Written ideas are as numerous as the human capacity to write words on things. Books, magazines, and other physical forms of text are all pretty obvious sources of written material that you might want to cite, but when it comes to text found on the Internet, the same rules apply, whether you’re using ideas found on a simple website like Wikipedia, a discussion you’ve been following on Reddit, or statistics from an infographic someone posted on Facebook.
Remember, even if you don’t know who the author of a piece of information is, that information still must be cited.
Media in Research
Video and audio are formats that provide information that can be used to support your research, but these ideas should be cited just like you would cite text. Each citation style has its own rules for these types of material. Just like you need bibliographic information like the title and author of a textual work, it’s important to keep track of the air date, title (this can be as simple as “Channel 7, Ten O’clock News”), and producing entity of both video and audio sources for easy citation.
Media as Audiovisual Aids
If you use images, video, or audio to support your assignment as audio or visual aids, all of this material must be cited, unless you are the original creator.
Keep in mind that plagiarism and copyright violations are not the same.
Copyright is a legal concern; avoiding plagiarism is an ethical and academic one. Even if you are given permission by a copyright holder to use an image, that image still must be cited. On the other hand, citing an image properly does not mean that using it does not violate copyright. For more information on copyright, please consult these Penn State copyright resources.
Citing Yourself
If you have done a previous assignment on a topic, you can’t copy and paste that research into a current paper without citing yourself. Reusing an assignment in this way is an egregious academic integrity violation. Building on your previous work by citing yourself, however, is mature academic practice, and only takes about thirty seconds. You worked hard on that other paper, cite yourself!