Citing Sources

Avoiding Plagiarism

Helpful information on what you need to do to avoid plagiarizing in your paper.

APA Style

The American Psychological Association (APA) Style is used in many of HACC's social science and health classes.

MLA Style

The Modern Language Association (MLA) Style is used in most of HACC's humanities, English, and general education courses.

Why Cite?

When you include someone else’s ideas in a paper, whether quoting or paraphrasing, you must document or cite the sources of the ideas. In other words, if you have learned anything new and include it in your paper, you must give credit to whoever provided the new information.

Documenting your sources is a TWO STEP process:

List citations (e.g. author, title(s), publisher, date, pages) for all the works you used in alphabetical order on a separate page at the end of your paper. This list is called a works cited page, bibliography, source list, or references. How you list your citations depends on which style you use. It is important to be consistent in identifying your sources so that another reader can locate the same material.
Identify (briefly in parenthesis) in the paper's text the works you have used. These are called parenthetical or in-text citations.