Any idea or quote from other people or resources that you use in writing your paper needs to be cited.  Citations give credit to those people/resources and provide your reader with the information needed to identify your sources.

A citation of a book generally includes author(s), title, publisher and date. A citation of an article generally includes author(s), article title, journal title, volume, pages, and date. Citations for web documents and articles from databases also include a URL and may need the date the information was accessed.

There are many different formats used in writing papers. The American Psychological Association (APA), and Modern Language Association (MLA), University of Chicago (Chicago) and the  American Sociological Association (ASA)  are some of the most popular. Always check with your professor to know which format or style should be used.

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s work as if it were your own, whether you mean to or not. "Someone else’s work" means anything that is not your own idea, even if it is presented in your own style.

It includes material from books, journals or any other printed source, the work of other students or staff, information from the Internet, software programs and other electronic material, designs and ideas. It also includes the organization or structuring of any such material.

To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use

• another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
• any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings—any pieces of information—that are not common knowledge (see below);
• quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words;
• paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words.

Find out more about plagiarism and how to avoid it here, Avoiding Plagiarism Libguide