History R1B Spies, Scouts, and Snitches:: Citing Sources

Look here for Library workshops on citation management tools.
I offer Zotero workshops on demand for five or more students who can get themselves organized and find a time that works for them and for me.  

In order to avoid plagiarism, you must give credit when

• You use another person's ideas, opinions, or theories.
• You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that does not comprise common knowledge.
• You use quotations from another person's spoken or written word.
• You paraphrase another person's spoken or written word.

Recommendations

• Begin the writing process by stating your ideas; then go back to the author's original work.
• Use quotation marks and credit the source (author) when you copy exact wording.
• Use your own words (paraphrase) instead of copying directly when possible.
• Even when you paraphrase another author's writings, you must give credit to that author.
• If the form of citation and reference are not correct, the attribution to the original author is likely to be incomplete. Therefore, improper use of style can result in plagiarism. Get a style manual and use it.
• The figure below may help to guide your decisions.
  
  

This content is part of the Understanding Plagiarism tutorial created by the Indiana University School of Education.

Reference managers (also called citation managers or bibliographic management software) offer a way to save, organize and manage references. Many work with word processing software to format in-text citations and bibliographies for papers and theses, allow you to share references, and enable you to attach or link PDFs to a citation record.
 

Zotero

• Free (up to 300 MB) web storage
• Sync Zotero to access your library from any computer with internet access
• Format bibliographies in Word and Google Docs
• Capture citation data from PDFs and web pages
• Share and collaboratively edit lists of references
• View and annotate PDFs in the program's PDF viewer
• Open source software from the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University