Skip to main content
LibApps staff login

Literature Reviews and Annotated Bibliographies

Resources and guidance for understanding, writing, and researching literature reviews and annotated bibliographies.

Purpose of Citations, When and What to Cite?

Why Cite?

There are four main reasons:

  • To acknowledge the author(s) of the work that you used to write your paper.
  • To provide context for your research and demonstrate that your paper is well-researched.
  • To allow readers to find the original source and learn more about some aspects you mentioned briefly in the document.
  • To enable further research by letting others discover what has already been explored and written about on a topic.

What and When to Cite?

You should always cite other people's words, ideas, and other intellectual property that you use in your papers or that influence your ideas. This includes, but isn't limited to, books, journal articles, web pages, reports, data, statistics, speeches, lectures, personal interviews, and other similar materials. You should cite whenever you:

  • Use a direct quote
  • Paraphrase
  • Summarize
  • Use facts or statistics that are relatively less known or relate directly to your argument.

Citation Tools

Academic Integrity and Plagarism

Academic Integrity and Plagiarism Defined:

Academic integrity, student cheating, and plagiarism are of utmost importance to university faculty, administrators, writing center and tutoring staff, librarians, and academic advisors. The concise, straightforward definitions of academic integrity and plagiarism are intended to help individuals interested in learning more about these concepts.

Academic Integrity:

Most sources define academic integrity as the foundation for academic life.  It is the manner in which you behave in an academic environment when you do research, write a paper, or create a project. This academic process's five fundamental values are honesty, trust, respect, fairness, and responsibility. Academic integrity is the commitment to live by these values. Plagiarism is an aspect of academic integrity, as using another's ideas, words, theories, illustrations, graphics, opinions, or facts without proper citation is considered dishonest.

Plagiarism:

To use, steal, or represent the ideas, words, or products of another as your own ideas, words, or products. Use of someone else's ideas, words, or products without giving credit to the author or originator is considered plagiarism.

When using or quoting word-for-word the words of another person, it must be acknowledged.  Summarizing or paraphrasing the words or ideas of another without giving that person credit is also plagiarism.