As a student, citing is important because it shows your reader (or professor) that you have invested time in learning what has already been learned and thought about the topic before offering your own perspective. It is the practice of giving credit to the sources that inform your work.

Our definitions of academic integrity, academic misconduct, and plagiarism also give us important reasons for citing the sources we use to accomplish academic research. Here are all the good reasons for citing.

To Avoid Plagiarism & Maintain Academic Integrity

Misrepresenting your academic achievements by not giving credit to others indicates a lack of academic integrity. Most universities have an academic integrity policy, and violating it could lead to severe consequences, from getting a zero on one assignment, to failing a course, all the way up to expulsion. However, as long as you make a good-faith effort to give credit to others’ ideas, you are unlikely to be charged with intentional plagiarism.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

• Cite any ideas that aren’t your own, unless they are so common that everyone likely to read your work will already be familiar with them^[1]
• Cite your own work if you refer back to ideas or re-use text that you published elsewhere or submitted in a previous assignment
• Cite any text you quoted, summarized, or paraphrased, even if it is entirely in your own words now
• Give attribution for any images you used^[2]
• Use content accurately: don’t distort others’ ideas or take them out of context, even if you disagree with them
• Provide enough information in your citations for a reader to find the original source
• Make sure the work you submit consists mostly of your own thoughts, with support from outside sources, not the other way around

To Acknowledge the Work of Others

One major purpose of citations is to simply provide credit where it is due. When you provide accurate citations, you are acknowledging both the hard work that has gone into producing research and the person(s) who performed that research.

Think about the effort you put into your work (whether essays, reports, or even non-academic jobs): if someone else took credit for your ideas or words, would that seem fair, or would you expect to have your efforts recognized?

To Provide Credibility to Your Work & to Place Your Work in Context

Providing accurate citations puts your work and ideas into an academic context. They tell your reader that you’ve done your research and know what others have said about your topic. Not only do citations provide context for your work, but they also lend credibility and authority to your claims.

For example, if you’re researching and writing about sustainability and construction, you should cite experts in sustainability, construction, and sustainable construction in order to demonstrate that you are well-versed in the most common ideas in the fields. Although you can make a claim about sustainable construction after doing research only in that particular field, your claim will carry more weight if you can demonstrate that your claim can be supported by the research of experts in closely related fields as well.

Citing sources about sustainability and construction as well as sustainable construction demonstrates the diversity of views and approaches to the topic. Proper citation also demonstrates the ways in which research is social: no one researches in a vacuum—we all rely on the work of others to help us during the research process.

To Help Your Future Researching Self & Other Researchers Easily Locate Sources

Having accurate citations will help you as a researcher and writer keep track of the sources and information you find so that you can easily find the source again. You should track your sources in a research log, document, or citation management software. Accurate citations may take some effort to produce, but they will save you time in the long run. So think of proper citation as a gift to your future researching self! There are many citation styles, and different styles are used in different disciplines, but any style of citation should provide enough information for a reader to find your original sources and read for themselves.