English 104: College Composition

If the above player doesn't work, try this direct link.

In this video, you'll learn the basics of citing a source within a text. This lesson will introduce you to sources with one author, multiple authors, organizations as authors and even anonymous sources.

Introduction

Whenever you're writing a paper, there is one very important step that must be followed: citing sources. There are two places where you will need to cite sources: within your text and in your reference or bibliography page. In this video, we are going to focus on citing sources within the text.

What Is A Citation?

First, let's do a quick review of what a citation actually is and why we use them. According toPlagiarism.org, a citation is a way to tell your reader that certain material in your work came from another source. In fact, I just used a citation to define the word for you! Whenever we use information we learned from others in our writing, we are required to cite the source.

There are two pieces of information you will always need for citing a source: the author's name and the year of publication. If you are utilizing a direct quote, meaning you are using the exact words the original author used in the exact same order, you also need to put where the quote can be found. This might include the page on which the quote is found in a book or journal article, or even the paragraph where it can be found if you are using a website without page numbers.

When it comes to the name of the author, it is important to know if you are dealing with one author, multiple authors, information from places like corporations or government organizations or even works with no or an anonymous author. Exactly how you cite the source in your paper depends on your lead-in. Let's start with a source in which you are paraphrasing the author's work. If I am using a source with one author, this is how the citation might look:

Some believe Duke Ellington's biggest gift from his parents was confidence (Crease, 2009).

I can also write:

According to Crease (2009), Duke Ellington's biggest gift from his parents was confidence.

Both of these options display the same information. The information that I am citing came from a work written by an author with the last name of Crease, and the work was published in 2009. If I am going to quote directly from the book exactly as written, the citation would look like this:

Crease (2009) believed there is one thing Mr. Ellington's parents gave him above everything else when she stated, 'Duke Ellington's biggest gift from his mother and father was his confidence' (p. 13).

Citing Multiple Authors

Now that we have figured out how to cite a source from one author, let's look at sources with multiple authors. The first thing to remember is that when a source has two authors, you cite both names every time you use the source. So your citations will look very similar to the citation with one author, except you will have two authors and use the word 'and' between each author. Remember to cite the names in the order in which they appear in the book or article, not necessarily in alphabetical order. Things start to change a bit when we are citing sources with three or more authors. The first time you use the source, you will list the last name of each author - again, remember you are writing the names in the order in which they appear. Here is an example:

According to Geiger, Allen and Strader (1990), 'Computer simulation of a circuit entails using a computer to predict, or simulate the performance of a circuit or system' (p. 237).

However, the next time you use the same reference, instead of listing the names of all three authors, you just have to put the last name of the first author followed by the words et al., so my second time citing the trio would look like this:

this circuit could include several hundred thousand components (Geiger et al., 1990).

Citing Corporations And Organizations

Working in a pretty similar fashion to works with several authors, if you are citing a source that happens to be a corporation or organization, write the entire name out the first time the source is used. In subsequent citations, the abbreviated name will suffice. An example is:

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2012) then becomes (CDC, 2012) the next time I use the same source.

If you are using an anonymous source, your citation will look like the one on the screen: (Anonymous, 2011).

The second piece of information you will always need for a source is the date in which the information you are using was published. The publication date will be in one of several places depending on the type of source you are using. If you are citing a book, the publication date will be on the copyright page. If you are citing a journal article, the publication date will be on the cover of the journal; this is also true for a magazine. You can often find the publication date for Internet-based sources at the bottom of the page view.

Lesson Summary

For a quick way to remember this information, ask yourself three questions whenever you are citing a source:

1. Am I going to use a direct quote or a paraphrase? This will let you know if you need to include the page or paragraph number where the direct quote can be found.

2. Who is the author, and how many are there? While you will always cite the first use consistently, you will cite subsequent citations in an abbreviated format if you have three or more authors or the name of an organization that includes several words.

3. What year was this published? You will always include the year of publication.

Admittedly, this can seem like a lot of information at first; however, I am confident that you will be breezing through citing sources within text in no time. The more you practice, the easier it will become!