What to Cite
You must cite anything that is not your own intellectual work, whether you are copying someone else’s words directly (quoting), duplicating or adapting a table or figure, or putting information you’ve learned from a source into your own words (summarizing or paraphrasing). It is important to note that citing copied wording properly involves not only indicating the source of the wording, but also placing quotation marks around the copied words.
To determine if something needs to be cited, ask yourself, How do I know this? If the answer is I read it in X or I heard it from Y, a citation is required.
Be sure to cite all information you take from others, no matter what it is or where you got it from, whether it is from a printed source or from the internet, whether it is something you saw on TV or heard on the radio, or whether you got it from a tweet, a blog, a Facebook posting, PowerPoint slides, or even a personal discussion.
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An Incomplete List of Sources that Require Citation
| Articles
Videos Apps Music Reports Statistics Letters |
Podcasts
Speeches Books Photographs Websites Movies Performances of all kinds |
Graphs
Interviews Radio & TV Programs Tweets Art Emails |
Maps
Ebooks Web Documents Handouts Data Conferences and lectures Discussions |
What doesn’t need to be cited
You don’t need to cite your own thoughts, ideas, data, or creations.
There is one exception to this rule: you may need to acknowledge your own work if you are reusing it in another course or assignment (however, make sure you receive the express permission of your instructor to do this, first). This is because academic work is expected to be new in order to earn new academic credit.
You also don’t need to cite common knowledge.
Common Knowledge
There is only one exception to the rule about citing all information learned from others, and that is when that information is considered common knowledge.
General common knowledge is information that most people know.
EXAMPLES
- Capital cities
- Important historical dates and persons
- Basic mathematics
- Common sense observations
This information does not need to be cited. However, it is always best to cite something if you aren’t sure if it is common knowledge or not.
Discipline-specific common knowledge
Besides general common knowledge, there is also information that is so well known within a field of study that it is considered common knowledge WITHIN this particular field (discipline-specific common knowledge), though it would not be considered common knowledge outside of this field.
Discipline-specific common knowledge is:
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Information that is well known only within a specific field of study
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NOT considered common knowledge outside of the specific discipline
Determining discipline-specific common knowledge can sometimes be tricky, so when in doubt, cite!
Citing too much is much less of a concern than not citing enough, because when you over-cite, you have not misrepresented where the material has come from. If you are unsure if something is common knowledge, it is better to cite it than not.
Attributions
This chapter is an adaptation of 4.3 What Needs To Be Cited by Donnie Calabrese; Emma Russell; Jasmine Hoover; and Tammy Byrne and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. You can download this book free at Academic Integrity Handbook Copyright © 2020.
This chapter is also an adaptation of 4.4 What Doesn’t Need To Be Cited by Donnie Calabrese; Emma Russell; Jasmine Hoover; and Tammy Byrne and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. You can download this book free at Academic Integrity Handbook Copyright © 2020.
This chapter is also an adaptation of 4.5 Common Knowledge by Donnie Calabrese; Emma Russell; Jasmine Hoover; and Tammy Byrne and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted. You can download this book free at Academic Integrity Handbook Copyright © 2020.
