3.5: Documenting Sources in APA, MLA, or IEEE Styles

Learning Objectives

6.  Integrate and document information using commonly accepted citation guidelines.

To prove formally that we’ve done research, we use a two-part system for documenting sources. The first part is a citation that gives a few brief pieces of information about the source right where that source is used in our document and points to the second part, the bibliographic reference at the end of the document. This second part gives further details about the source so that readers can easily retrieve it themselves. Though documenting research requires a little more effort than not, it looks so much better than including research in a document without showing where you got it, which is called plagiarism. Before focusing further on how to document sources, it’s worthwhile to consider why we do it and what exactly is wrong with plagiarism.

3.5.1: Academic Integrity vs. Plagiarism

Academic integrity basically means that you do your work yourself and formally credit your sources when you use research, whereas plagiarism is cheating. Students often plagiarize by stealing the work of others from the internet (e.g., copying and pasting text, or dragging and dropping images) and dumping it into an assignment without quoting or citing; putting their name on that assignment means that they’ve dishonestly presented someone else’s work as their own. Lesser violations involve not quoting or citing properly. But why would anyone try to pull one over on their instructor like this when instructors award points for doing research? If you’re going to do your homework, you might as well do it right by finding credible sources, documenting them, and getting credit for doing so rather than sneak your research in as if you’ll get points for originality, for coming up with professional-grade material yourself, and end up getting penalized for it. But what makes plagiarism so wrong?

Plagiarism is theft, and bad habits of stealing others’ work in school likely begin as liberal attitudes towards intellectual property in our personal lives, but often develop into more serious crimes of copyright or patent violations in professional situations with equally serious financial penalties or destruction of reputations and earning power. The bad habits perhaps start from routines of downloading movies and music illegally because, well, everybody does it and few get caught (Helbig, 2014), or so the thinking goes; the rewards seem to outweigh the risks. But when download bandits become professionals, and are tasked with, say, posting on their company website some information about a new service the company is offering, their research and writing procedure might go something like this:

  1. They want their description of the service to look professional, so they Google-search to see what other companies offering the same service say about it on their websites. So far, so good.
  2. Those other descriptions look good, and the employee can’t think of a better way to put it, so they copy and paste the other company’s description into their own website. Here’s where things go wrong.
  3. They also see that the other company has posted an attractive photo beside their description, so the employee downloads that and puts it on their website also.

The problem is that both the text and photo were copyrighted, as indicated by the “All Rights Reserved” copyright notice at the bottom of the other company’s webpage. Once the employee posts the stolen text and photo, the copyright owner (or their legal agents) find it through a simple Google search, Google Alerts notification, reverse image search, or digital watermarking notification (Rose, 2013). The company’s agents send them a “cease & desist” order, but they ignore it and then find that they’re getting sued for damages. Likewise, if you’re in hi-tech R&D (research and development), help develop technology that uses already-patented technology without paying royalties to the patent owner, and take it to market, the patent owner is being robbed of the ability to bring in revenue on their intellectual property themselves and can sue you for lost earnings. Patent, copyright, and trademark violations are a major legal and financial concern in the professional world (SecureYourTrademark, 2015), and acts of plagiarism have indeed ruined perpetrators’ careers when they’re caught, which is easier than ever (Bailey, 2012).

Every college has its own academic integrity policy that helps you avoid the consequences of plagiarism. Fanshawe College’s policy, for instance, defines an academic offence as follows:
“Obtaining or attempting to obtain an unfair advantage or credit for academic work for oneself or others by dishonest means” (Policy A136, Fanshawe College, 2021).

This means that successfully cheating – or even trying to cheat – is considered an offence. As mentioned earlier, we are committing an offence ourselves if we plagiarise or copy off someone. However, if we help someone else to cheat (let’s say by lending them our work), we are still committing an offence because we have assisted an offence in occurring.

If you keep two key concepts in mind: ‘unfair advantage’ and ‘dishonest means’, you’ll be able to see why certain actions and behaviours are considered to be Academic Offences when we look at the list of eleven Academic Offences in the next module.

It’s important to understand that both intentional and unintentional actions and behaviour can result in Academic Offences. It is often very clear when Academic Offences have occurred intentionally: perhaps a student intended to cheat on a test, or perhaps they submitted an assignment as their own, knowing that they did not do the work.

Intentional Academic Offences often result in the application of penalties which are disciplinary measures. Examples of unintentional Academic Offences include:

  • improper citation in an assignment by a student not familiar with citing requirements,
  • providing a completed assignment to a friend, not realizing that they may submit it as their own work, and
  • uploading assignments to course content-sharing sites like Course Hero, not realizing that students may download the assignments and submit them as their own.

Unintentional Academic Offences often result in Warnings being issued so that students become aware that those actions and behaviours are not acceptable. Warnings are intended to be learning opportunities. Penalties would be applied if actions and behaviours continue after a Warning has been issued. Fanshawe’s Academic Integrity policy, for example, outlines eleven academic offences:

  1. The student commits plagiarism which means taking credit for another person’s work.
  2. The student acts to assist or facilitate an Academic Offence.
  3. The student misrepresents the reasons for a missed evaluation or deadline extension.
  4. The student allows another person to complete the student’s academic work, excluding quizzes, tests, and exams.
  5. The student copies from another person during a quiz, test, or exam.
  6. The student participates in activities, in person or electronically, that are not permitted in the preparation or completion of academic work.
  7. The student uses materials, resources, or technologies that are not permitted in the preparation or completion of academic work.
  8. The student possesses or uses materials, resources, or technologies that are not permitted in a quiz, test, or exam.
  9. The student improperly obtains any evaluation prior to the date and time scheduled for the evaluation.
  10. The student alters or falsifies academic records in any way or submits false documentation for academic purposes.
  11. The student allows another person to take a quiz, test, or exam in the student’s place.

Fanshawe’s penalties for plagiarizing increase with each offence. Penalties are disciplinary measures that are applied depending on the frequency and severity of Academic Offences. The following Penalties can be applied when any of the 11 Academic Offences occur:

  • Re-do Work: the student is required to re-do the academic work for either full or reduced marks by a due date specified by the Course Instructor.
  • Mark of Zero: a mark of zero is assigned to compromised portions of the quiz, test, exam, or assignment, or a mark of zero is assigned to a quiz, test, exam, or assignment in its entirety.
  • Fail Course: an automatic grade of ‘F’ for the course in which the Academic Offence occurred.
  • Suspension: the student is suspended from the College for the remainder of the term, for the remainder of the term plus one to two full terms, or the remainder of the term plus three full terms, which would be a complete academic year. The student would be permitted to return to the College and resume their studies when the Suspension has lapsed.
  • Expulsion: the student is expelled from the College, and a minimum of five years would have to lapse before the student could reapply for admission (Academic Integrity at Fanshawe College, 2022).

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For more information about academic integrity at Fanshawe, and for additional resources, consult the following:

You would probably be hotly pursuing expulsion if you became a serial plagiarist who knows that it’s wrong and that you’ll get caught but do it anyway. The internet, and in particular, the rise of Artificial Intelligence tools (AI), such as ChatGPT and the like,  may make cheating easier by offering easy access to coveted material and generative responses, but it also makes detection easier in the same way.

Students who think they’re too clever to get caught plagiarizing may not realize that plagiarism in anything they submit electronically is easily exposed by sophisticated plagiarism-detection software and other techniques. Most instructors use apps like Turnitin (built into the BrightSpace LMS, also known as FanshaweOnline at Fanshawe College ) that produce originality reports showing the percentage of assignment content copied from sources found either on the public internet, in a global database of student-submitted assignments, or through the use of Ai tools. That way, assignments borrowed, generated through AA without Prior permission from the instructor, or bought from someone who’s submitted the same or similar will also be flagged. For instance, the software would alert the instructor of common plagiarism scenarios, such as when:

  • Two students in the same class submit substantially the same assignment work because:
    • One of them started working on it the night before it was due and got their classmate friend to send them their assignment draft, which the cheating student changed slightly to make it look different; it will still be 90% the same, which is enough for the instructor to give both a zero and require that they meet after class to discuss who did what. Remember that supplying someone with materials for the purpose of plagiarism is also a punishable offense.
    • They worked on the assignment together, even though it was designated an individual assignment only, but each changed a few details here and there at the end to make the submissions look different.
  • A student submits an assignment that was previously submitted by another student in another class at the same time or in the past, at a different school, or even on the other side of the planet (either way, they’re all in the global database).

Other techniques allow instructors to track down uncited media just as professional photographers or stock photography vendors like Getty Images use digital watermarks or reverse image searches to find unpermitted uses of their copyrighted material. There are also reverse AI detection tools available for instructors to use in the same way a student would use them to generate assignments.

Plagiarism is also easy to sniff out in hardcopy assignments by any but the most novice and gullible instructors. Dramatic, isolated improvements in a student’s quality of work, either between assignments or within an assignment, will trigger an instructor’s suspicions. If a student’s writing on an assignment is mostly terrible with multiple writing errors in each sentence, but then is suddenly perfect and professional-looking in one sentence only without quotation marks or a citation, the instructor just runs a Google search on that sentence to find where exactly it was copied from.

A cheater’s last resort to try to make plagiarism untraceable is to pay someone to do a customized assignment for them, but this still arouses suspicions for the same reasons as above. The student who goes from submitting poor work to perfect work becomes a “person of interest” target to their instructor in all that they do after that. The hack also becomes expensive not only for that assignment but also for all the instances when the cheater will have to pay someone to do the work that they should have just learned to do themselves. For all these reasons, it’s better just to learn what you’re supposed to by doing assignments yourself and showing academic integrity by crediting sources properly when doing research.

But do you need to cite absolutely everything you research? Not necessarily. Good judgment is required to know what information can be left uncited without penalty. If you look up facts that are common knowledge (perhaps just not common to you yet, since you had to look them up), such as that the first Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John A. MacDonald, represented the riding of Victoria for his second term as PM even without setting foot there, you wouldn’t need to cite them because any credible source you consulted would say the same. Such citations end up looking like attempts to pad an assignment with research.

Certainly, anything quoted directly from a source (because the wording is important) must be cited, as well as anyone’s original ideas, opinions, or theories that you paraphrase or summarize (i.e., indirectly quote) from a book, article, or webpage with an identifiable author, argument, and/or primary research producing new facts. You must also cite any media such as photos, videos, drawings/paintings, graphics, graphs, etc. If you are ever unsure about whether something should be cited, you can always ask your librarian or, better yet, your instructor since they’ll ultimately assess your work for academic integrity. Even the mere act of asking assures them that you care about academic integrity. For more on plagiarism, you can also visit plagiarism.org and the Purdue OWL Avoiding Plagiarism series of modules (Elder, Pflugfelder, & Angeli, 2010).

Note: If you’re enrolled in a communications course for your program that’s offered by the School of Language and Liberal Studies, the required method of citation is APA format (unless otherwise specified by your course instructor).

Citing and Referencing Sources in APA Style
Citing and Referencing Sources in MLA Style
Citing and Referencing Sources in IEEE Style
Citing Images and Other Media

 

Key Takeaway

Cite and reference each source you use in a research document following the documentation style conventions adopted by your field of study, whether APA, MLA, or IEEE.

Exercise

Drawing from your quotation, paraphrase, and summary exercises at the end of §3.4, assemble of combination of each, as well as media such as a photograph and a YouTube video, into a short research report on your chosen topic with in-text citations and bibliographical entries in the documentation style (APA, MLA, or IEEE) adopted by your field of study.


Parts of this chapter section have been adapted from the following:

1.4,” 2.1”, and “3.1” in Academic Integrity at Fanshawe College Copyright © 2022 by the Academic Integrity Office at Fanshawe College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

License

3.5: Documenting Sources in APA, MLA, or IEEE Styles Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Stracuzzi and Brian Dunphy. All Rights Reserved.

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