Citations

Cite your sources

When doing research, it's very important to give credit to the writer or creator of the work that you used to gather your information.

Imagine if you write a story. Not just any story, but the best story in the world. Everyone wants to read your story. You become famous and make a gazillion dollars selling copies of your story. That would be cool, wouldn't it? Well, imagine if, instead of you getting rich and famous, I took your story and told everyone that I wrote it. Then I got rich and famous selling your story! How would you feel if I took all that great work you did and told everyone that I did it? Even if I didn't get rich or famous using your work, would it still be wrong?

To protect authors, artists, musicians, and creators of all kinds of works, we have the notion of copyright. Each thing that you write, or create, whether at school or anywhere else (what we call your "intellectual property"), is copyright protected to prevent others from stealing your work and getting credit for it.

This is true of the authors and photographers and artists who created the work that we are using in our research. This means that in order to use their work appropriately, we must give them credit - we 'cite' our sources. This is how we respect their intellectual property. We borrow, but don't take their work; we make sure that the original author is written down, along with information for finding that source again.

Your job then, as you research, is to write down the information from each site that you use in your research. Every site you use gets its own citation.

• For each citation, you follow the rules on this site .
• In this project, most of our sources will be online sources, so you can focus on that format.

Practice: Use the following sites and write citations, in proper format, for these articles. Find the author, the web site name, the title of the article, the date you looked at the site (today's date), and the beginning of the URL.

Text:

• American Indians of the Pacific Northwest
• Native American Foods: Indian Tacos

Pictures:

• If you want to use pictures in your presentation, be sure to give credit to the photographer/artist. Write a citation for this image on this page: Boys with Buckets

Example:

• Here is the answer key for the photo example above.