Citing Your Sources
Writing a research paper means documenting the sources of the information you use. How do you cite your sources? Every time you mention another work in your own paper, you call out the source of it, and then you include a list of all the sources used in your whole paper in a bibliography at the end.
There are many different ways to call out sources in your paper and many different ways to format the bibliography. These are called citation styles, and the professor who assigns a research paper (or the publisher of a paper if it is being written for publication) tells writers which style they should use for any particular paper.
For the TA 383 research paper, Professor Farrell has specified that you should use the MLA (Modern Language Association) style. You can find out what this style looks like (how to call out sources in your text and how to format your bibliography) by consulting its style guide -- see below:
Style Manuals
MLA Handbook by Call Number: Young Library Reference/Fine Arts Reference: LB2369 .G53 2016MLA (Modern Language Association) style is most commonly used to write academic papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities, including theatre research. The MLA Handbook describes exactly how to use it.
- MLA Formatting and Style Guide
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OWL, Purdue University's Online Writing Lab, has created an online overview to help writers cite sources using MLA style, including the list of works cited and in-text citations.
(Please note: There is a citation generator on this site that is not free or recommended. See the list of recommended citation generators on our guide to Style Guides and Manuals.)
Citing and Plagiarism
- The Office of Academic Ombud Services Guide to Academic Integrity: Cheating and PlagiarismSenate Rule 6.3.1 states that "All academic work, written or otherwise, submitted by students to their instructors or other academic supervisors, is expected to be the result of their own thought, research or self-expression." There are severe penalties for presenting others' work as your own, including for failing to properly cite sources you use in research papers.
- University of Kentucky's Plagiarism PolicyUK's Official Policy on what constitutes plagiarism.
Citation Management
To help you keep track of the citations you find for articles, books, and images while you're researching, and to help you integrate the citations into your papers, footnotes, and bibliographies while you're writing, it can be helpful to use a citation management tools such as EndNote or Zotero.
Using a citation management tool (also called a bibliographic management tool) allows you to save your source citations for later, which is especially valuable for longer papers, like theses and dissertations, and for topics you return to over time.
EndNote is a subscription software program designed to store and manipulate bibliographic information (your citations). It is one of the one of the more powerful and popular citation management tools. It is not freely available for everyone, but as a UK student or staff or faculty member, you can download and use EndNote as part of the university's subscription.
- UK Software Downloadswith a student, staff or faculty login, download software to your computer.
- ZoteroIncludes the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references, and the ability to organize, tag, and search in advanced ways.