Scholarly Project Resources

Why Cite?

There are four main reasons:

1. To acknowledge the author(s) of the work that you used to write your paper.
2. To provide context to your research and demonstrate that your paper is well-researched.
3. To allow readers to find the original source and learn more about some aspect that you mentioned only briefly in the document.
4. To enable further research by letting others discover what has already been explored and written about on a given topic.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​What and When to Cite?

You should always cite other people's words, ideas and other intellectual property that you use in your papers or that influence your ideas. This includes but isn't limited to books, journal articles, web pages, reports, data, statistics, speeches, lectures, personal interviews, etc. You should cite whenever you:

• use a direct quote
• paraphrase
• summarize
• use facts or statistics that are relatively less known or relate directly to your argument.