Nursing and Health Sciences

Why do you need to cite the sources you use for your papers?*

1. Your professors expect you to read about the research of others, and to bring together their ideas in such a way that makes sense to you and will make sense to your readers.Therefore, it's essential for you to cite your sources in any research paper you write. The academic reasons for doing so are to give credit to those who have done the original research and written the article or book, and to allow readers (your professors) to look at them if needed to find out if you have properly understood what the author was trying to say.

2. On a practical level, citing your sources is a way to show that you've done the assignment. If your paper contains no citations, the implication is that you have done a piece of original research, but that probably was not the assignment. Citations (along with the bibliography) show that you have consulted a variety of resources as the assignment required. They're also an acknowledgement of your indebtedness to those authors.

3. So you don't feel you need to hide the fact that you're drawing from one of your sources. That's what it's all about.

*Adapted from: Taylor, Bill. "A letter to my students." Academic Integrity Seminar. 29 Feb. 2008

When do you cite? Whenever you use:

• Another person's words, ideas, or opinions, whether directly quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.
• Interviews, movies, television shows, artwork, websites; basically anything created by someone else.
• Statistics, facts, and figures.

Improper citation can quickly turn into plagiarism - or the act of representing someone else's words, ideas, or opinions as yours. Most students know to cite when directly quoting another work but borrowing an idea without crediting the original source is plagiarism, too. As the Purdue OWL website states, be sure to cite "any words, ideas, or other productions that originate somewhere outside of you." 

For more tips on avoiding plagiarism, use OWL's Using Research page.

Basic Format for Books

Note: For "Location," you should always list the city and the state using the two letter postal abbreviation without periods (New York, NY).

Basic Format for Periodical Articles

Note: APA style dictates that authors are named last name followed by initials; publication year goes between parentheses, followed by a period. The title of the article is in sentence-case, meaning only the first word and proper nouns in the title are capitalized. The periodical title is run in title case, and is followed by the volume number which, with the title, is also italicized.

Basic Format for Articles From a Database

Note: APA states that including database information in citations is not necessary because databases change over time (p. 192). However, the OWL still includes information about databases for those users who need database information.

When referencing a print article obtained from an online database (such as a database in the library), provide appropriate print citation information (formatted just like a "normal" print citation would be for that type of work). By providing this information, you allow people to retrieve the print version if they do not have access to the database from which you retrieved the article. You can also include the item number or accession number or database URL at the end, but the APA manual says that this is not required.

If you are citing an article from a database that is available in other places, such as a journal or magazine, include the homepage's URL. You may have to do a web search of the article's title, author, etc. to find the URL. 

For articles that are easily located, do not provide database information. If the article is difficult to locate, then you can provide database information. Only use retrieval dates if the source could change, such as Wikis. For more about citing articles retrieved from electronic databases, see pages 187-192 of the Publication Manual.

Basic  Format for Nonperiodical Web Document, Web Page, or Report

List as much of the following information as possible (you sometimes have to hunt around to find the information; don't be lazy. If there is a page like http://www.somesite.com/somepage.htm, and somepage.htm doesn't have the information you're looking for, move up the URL to http://www.somesite.com/):

Note: When an Internet document is more than one Web page, provide a URL that links to the home page or entry page for the document. Also, if there isn't a date available for the document use (n.d.) for no date.