ENF 3 Sources: Locating, Citing & Giving Credit: Start Here

The best place to look for college level resources is your library homepage:  Library.Reynolds.edu

It is important to think critically about the resources you find online as well as in print to determine if a resource is credible. The checklist below will help you identify resources to use for college research assignments:

ABCD’s of Evaluating Resources:  

1. Author/Authority
2. Bias
3. Content/Currency
4. Design

The primary reason to cite your sources is to avoid plagiarism and give proper credit to the original author or creator.  Other reasons for citing your sources:

• Enables a reader to locate the sources you cited.
• Demonstrates the accuracy and reliability of your information.
• Shows the amount of research you’ve done.
• Strengthens your work by lending outside support to your ideas.

Plagiarism is using another person’s ideas or words without clearly acknowledging or citing the source of that information. You must give credit whenever you use:

• Another person's idea, opinion, or theory.
• Direct quotes from another person's actual spoken or written words.
• Paraphrasing of another person's spoken or written words.
• Any piece of information this is not common knowledge (e.g., fact, figure, statistic, chart)
• Multimedia created by another person (e.g., photo, drawing, film clip, music, etc.)