Research Guides: Citing Research Guide: Home

What is a citation?

A citation is the basic information required to identify and locate a specific source (e.g. book, book chapter, article, website, video, etc)
Different academic disciplines have specific guidelines for organizing material and citing sources. These rules are published as style manuals.

Why do we cite our sources?

Accurate and complete citations help avoid plagiarism.
Citing your sources properly gives credit to the original author.
Citations allow others find the sources you used in your research. Your credibility is established by using academic sources.

Plagiarism Awareness

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is "presenting within one’s own work the ideas, representations, or words of another person without customary and proper acknowledgement of that person’s authorship." (3.1.3 TCC Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities)/p>

To avoid plagiarism make sure to correctly paraphrase (put into your own words) and include citations for information that was not your original thought. For more information, please explore the links below or reach out to a librarian using Ask A Librarian!

What is Plagiarism? Information for TCC Students (6:46)

Citation Creation Websites with No Spam

When using a citation builder, please always double check your sources with a reliable sample document to ensure your citations are correctly formatted.

Citation Builder (NC State University)
walks you through the process of creating citations for: books and ebooks; a chapter or essay from a book; magazine newspaper, scholarly journal articles (in print or online); and websites.It covers the citation styles APA, MLA 7 and 8, Chicago, and CSE/CBE. Once your citation is created by filling out the forms provided, you can cut and paste your generated citation into your bibliography.
Knight Cite
covers MLA 8/9, APA, and Chicago, it provides forms to help you make citations for a wide range of resources in print, online, and in multimedia and communication. That means this tool will not only help you cite a book, article, or website, it can help you cite a cartoon, advertisement, musical composition, radio or TV program, email, and more. Knight Cite allows you to create a free Knight Cite account so you can save citations for later and export them to Word document.
MyBib
is a free online citation bibliography creation tool. It can create citations and bibliographies in many styles such as MLA 8 and 9, APA, Chicago, and more. MyBib allows you to paste in a website URL or even search for a book, article, or other source by title, and will pull most of the information you need to create a citation (though you may need to double check that the information is correct and complete).