Research Paper for Language Arts & Literacy

Gr. 7/8 Language Arts Citing Sources in Research Paper Mrs. McCarthy

How and When to Cite Sources in My Research Paper

 What does attribution or citing references mean?  What types of information must I cite? o The short answer and the long answer. . What is common knowledge? . What is plagiarism?

Citing references, or attribution, within the text of your research paper simply means that you are acknowledging that you are writing something that you learned from an outside source. It is the only academically honest course of action. Do so faithfully. Any time you don’t attribute a point you learned form a source text, you are leading the reader to infer that the source material is your own—your own words, your own research, etc.

It does NOT matter if you paraphrase source material; in other words, if you re-write points/facts, in your own words, material that you found in an outside text—and you don’t cite it—it is considered academic dishonesty, or plagiarism.

Having said that, and understood its importance, we can step back and apply our reality check. If you are writing a research paper on the life of George Washington, you can easily imagine yourself citing every line in your paper (assuming you are not a George Washington scholar). To avoid this, academics have hit on the middle ground of Common Knowledge.

The Common Knowledge argument, as its name says, holds that it is not necessary to put a reference citation on points that have, over time, become part of society’s Common Knowledge. Everyone (sort of) knows this. It is the gray area that lets you avoid over-citing in your research paper.

What does this mean in real writing?

Let’s look at an example. Consider that you are writing a paper on the life of George Washington. You will write a nice introduction, moving from a very general opening, through 3-4 sentences more, ending at your very specific thesis: “Considered the father of our country, George Washington took the colonists from a scattered society to a small, but structured, nation under its own rule.”

We can safely argue that this statement about George Washington in our introduction falls under the umbrella of Common Knowledge. Therefore no citing of reference is needed.

However, in our second paragraph of our George Washington paper, we are going to enumerate some real stuff that you learned only from reading other people’s work on him. Examples include: where he was born, how younger life is was spent, what was his first government position, etc. You cite your source.

 EVEN IF you summarized/paraphrased what you read.  A passage does NOT have to be directly stated, verbatim, in quotation works, for it to require attribution.

*Modified information from Diane Dunay Gr. 7/8 Language Arts Citing Sources in Research Paper Mrs. McCarthy

Okay, now that we understand WHAT we need to document in the text of our research paper, now we need to look at how:

Most commonly-accepted, simple method of citing references in the text of student/professional research papers:

Use internal, parenthetical references right in your paragraphs, immediately following the material in questions.

 For example, following a direct quotation, put the author’s name and page number (if applicable) in parentheses. o “Washington’s famous wooden teeth are now housed at the Mendham Denture Museum on West Main Street.” (Jones, p. 65).  Following a paraphrased/summarized number of points, which you mixed into your own words and subordinated to your own rhetorical purpose, you can follow a section of your paper—say a whole paragraph—with the author’s name and a page range. o Penicillin was first discovered in 1896 by a French medical student and was later rediscovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928. By total accident, one of Fleming’s bacteria cultures was contaminated by a glue-green mold, which killed the bacteria in the culture. Later, it was concluded by Fleming that the mold produced a bacteria-killing substance. Fleming’s discovery was built on by Howard Florey, an Oxford scientist. Due to the economic strains brought by WWII, penicillin development was moved to the United States (Bellis, pp. 2-5).

 Note that MLA standards allow you to abbreviate long, clunky, titles AFTER their first reference. Once you have written out (The Cyclopedia Britannica, Vol. IV., No. 3, pp. 3-4), in subsequent references in the text of your paper, you are allowed to use a reasonable abbreviation: Ex. (Britannica, p. 4).

Final piece of Referencing Sources All work which cites source texts, in high school and beyond — as well as here in St.Joe’s — requires a page at the end entitled, “Works Cited”.

*Modified information from Diane Dunay