Lily Collin

Biographie

Citing Sources: What, When, and How Often to Cite

One of the most common questions about citing sources is: how often must I cite? Many students think
it’s acceptable to cite a source once at the end of a paragraph, but to make clear where your
information came from, you need to cite much more often than that.
You need to cite every time you’ve used words, ideas, or images from a source. If it didn’t come from
your own head, show where it did come from. And you need to place the citation with the source
material either in the sentence itself or in parenthesis at the end of it.

Citing Sources: What to Cite

There are only two things that don’t require citation.

They are:

• Common knowledge. If it’s a fact the average person could be expected to know, or if you could easilyf ind the same information in numerous reference materials, you don’t need a citation. For example, if you write that the American Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, you wouldn’t need to cite a source.
• Your own experiences, observations, memories, thoughts, and opinions. If you’re writing from knowledge that you had already before you did any research, you don’t need to cite a source. It’s assumed that anything in your paper that isn’t attributed to a source comes from you.

Citing Sources: When to Cite
Remember that the purpose of citations is to make clear to readers which material in your essay comes
from a source and which is your own thoughts. So you need to cite every time to use material from your
research.
You should place a citation in any sentence in which you use words, thoughts, facts, or opinions that you
learned from a source. This is true whether you use the exact words of the source or put the information
into your own words.
If you’ve used a lot of research in your paper, this may mean that every sentence will contain a citation.
That’s a good thing: it shows that you did extensive research and can back up your points. To keep the
citations from becoming repetitious, you can very them: sometimes putting the citation directly into the
sentence (“According to...”) other times using parenthetical citations.
Citing Sources: How Often to Cite
Whenever you use a source, you should let readers know that as early as possible and tell them what
the source is.
Because citations are designed to show readers which material came from a source and which from you,
it isn’t sufficient to cite once at the end of a paragraph. You need to include a citation for every piece of
borrowed information. But you don’t always have to do it in parenthesis. If you have a long passage of
information paraphrased from a single source, you can introduce it with a signal phrase (such as
“According to...”) and place a parenthetical citation at the end.

 

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