Citing Your Sources

How do I give credit to and cite my sources?

What is a citation?

Citations are references to specific sources of information that allow readers to identify and locate the original work used in a piece of writing. They serve multiple purposes:

• Citations give credit to the original authors or creators of ideas, data, or content reference in your work.
• Citations demonstrate credibility and show that you have conducted thorough research using verifiable sources.
• Citations further research by enabling readers to find and explore the original sources for more information.

What do citations look like?

Citations typically include several key pieces of information to help readers identify and locate the original source. The main components are:

1. Author(s): The name(s) of the creator(s) of the work, which can be individuals or organizations.
2. Title: The name of the specific work being cited, such as an article title or book title.
3. Date: The publication date or year when the work was created or published.
4. Source: Information about where the work can be found, such as a journal name, book publisher, or website URL.

Additional elements often included in citations are:

5. Volume and issue numbers: For journal articles.
6. Page numbers: For specific sections of longer works.
7. URL or DOI (Digital Object Identifier): A unique alphanumeric string assigned to some digital publications.

Anatomy of a Full Citation

So how do we place all of these pieces together to form a full citation? Use the following color-coded stucture guide for where to place these various citation elements (this is using the APA 7 citation style).

In environmental writing, we follow the APA 7 citation style, which involves two parts you will include in your writing:

Full citations, like the example above, are the entries that you put on your literature cited or references list at the end of your research report, paper, or essay:

• EXAMPLE: Ollerton, J., Winfree, R., and Tarrant, S. (2011). How many flowering plants are pollinated by animals? Oikos, 120, 321–326.

In-text citations come at the end of your summary/synthesis sentence where you are referencing information or ideas from a specific resource:

• EXAMPLE: More than 90 percent of tropical plant species are animal-pollinated, therefore the disruption of pollination represents one of the greatest threats to tropical biodiversity posed by habitat loss (Ollerton et al. 2011).

Using Directly Quoted Text

In academic and scientific writing, we generally use direct quotations very sparingly. We largely encourage students to focus on ideas and empirical evidence from their sources rather than specific wording. We want you to get into the practice of summarizing, paraphrasing and synthesizing ideas from your sources into your own words.
However, there are a few situations where using directly quoted text can be appropriate:

1. When reproducing an exact definition.
2. When responding to or analyzing specific wording
3. When quoting a unique term coined by a researcher.
4. When opening a paper with a historical or political quote.

If you use directly quoted text in your work, you should use in-text citations like this:

• EXAMPLE: “The greenhouse effect is a natural process that plays a major part in shaping the earth’s climate” (Mahato, 2015, p.1).
• Note: for direct quotes you form the same APA in-text citation, and also include the page number where the quoted text came from.