Citation Basics:

• Citation means crediting information from a source that you used in your research and writing. When you cite, you are giving some identifying information about the source you used.

• Citation has 2 aspects; you must do BOTH:

1. Rewrite ideas from the source (change words and sentence structure) OR provide a direct quotation ("...using quotes").

2. Give credit to the information source. You must do this even if you put the information in your own words.

• A variety of citation styles exist for different fields of study. For this project, use MLA 8 citation style with footnotes.

Citation Generators:

To create your MLA 8 Works Cited list, try one of these citation generators:

• MyBib 

• NoodleTools 

NOTE: Databases provide completed citations, so you do not need to enter the individual database elements into a citation generator's fields. Just copy and paste the entire database citation into the citation generator.

EXAMPLES:

• Example Muckraking Paper with Footnotes

• Citation and Plagiarism 

• How to Quote, Paraphrase, and Summarize

These are the most useful SIRS menu items for this assignment---------------------------------------------->

Truncation

Truncation means that a symbol is added to the end of a word root (when searching in a database). The symbol is usually an asterisk * and it tells the database to search for all forms of that word. 

For example, if you type censor* in a database's search box, then you will get articles with all instances of the word censor, such as:

• censor

• censors

• censored

• censoring

• censorship

Note: using an asterisk to truncate does not work in the New York Times database.