History 101 & 102 / American History Web Course WEB MODULE: Information Literacy / Library Skills
Developed by the Chesapeake College Library in conjunction with the History Department / © 2007 Last updated 5/17/07
Contents
Biography Resources
Electronic Databases
Other Resources
Part 5 -- Documenting Your Sources: Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due
Here, in Part 5, you learn to give credit to the expert authors whose ideas you have written into your paper.
This process of giving credit to others when you have used their ideas is called documentation, something you must do to avoid committing plagiarism, the theft of ideas. Plagiarism is a major academic infraction.
Documentation consists of TWO components:
- A Works Cited page is attached to the end of your research paper and lists all the sources (books, articles, Web sites) from which you took ideas that you wrote into your paper.
- Parenthetical references are placed in the text of your paper immediately after ideas from others and tell readers exactly where these ideas came from.
NOTE: For this History 101/102 paper, parenthetical references are NOT required. However, a properly formatted WORKS CITED page IS required!
Identifying the source of an idea can be expressed as citing that "source," which can also be called a "work." Citing a source is the same as citing a work, hence the term Works Cited page.
ELEMENTS OF A CITATION
When you use words or ideas from a source, you need to create a citation for that source. A citation for a book will include information like the author’s name, the title, the publisher and the publication date.
Middlekauff, Robert. Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies. Berkeley: U California, 1996.
Citations for journal articles may include issue numbers, page numbers, the name of the database you found it in, and the name of our library:
Wright, Esmond. “The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 30, July 1 through October 31, 1779.” English Historical Review 113.452 (June 1998): 755+. Biography Resource Center. Thomson Gale. Chesapeake Coll. Lib. 12 July 2007 <http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/?db=BioRC>.
There are lots of rules written by the Modern Language Association (MLA) about Works Cited Lists. What gets capitalized? What gets underlined? What goes first, author or title? What if there’s no author?
Use NoodleBib 6: A Works Cited Page Generator
To perfectly format your Work Cited page
according to MLA style, use NoodleBib 6 "fill-in-the-blank" software.
NoodleBib 6 is a Works Cited page generator.
To see how to use NoodleBib 6, complete this brief TUTORIAL
Click here to test your knowledge of the Information Literacy
concepts
explored in this tutorial.