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Research/Writing/Citing Sources: Home

This guide will help you learn how to conduct research, how to write well, and how to avoid plagiarism by citing your sources.

How to Do Research

Chicago Manual of Style Online

About this Guide

The Research/Writing/Citation Styles Guide is intended to help you throughout the research process, from how to get an idea for a research paper to finding scholarly materials that provide support for your paper to guides for writing well and producing a good bibliography.

Your bibliography consists of citations to the works you used as sources for your paper.  To be acceptable, you must cite these in a certain style.  The most common styles are those of the American Psychological Association, known as APA style, that of the Modern Languages Assosciation, known as MLA style, and the style created by the University of Chicago, known as Chicago style.  A commonly-used subset of Chicago is called Turabian after its most noted editor. Under the "Citation Styles" tab you will find pages for using APA, MLA, and Chicago/Turabian.  There are also many other styles and we reference some of them in the page "Other Citation Styles" under the "Citation Styles" tab.  Ask your professor if you are unsure as to which style you are to use for your research paper.

If you click on the "How to Read a Citation" under the "Citation Styles" tab, there is a page that explains the elements of a citation with examples of citations to books, journal articles, conference papers, newspaper articles, online articles, and websites, and how recognize which parts of a citation tell you the kind of source.

There are printed books called style guides for many of the styles listed above.  These days there is also a variety of software that formats your citations for you in the style you chose.  The Georgia Tech campus has a site license to a very full-featured bibliographic management software called EndNote.  We have information on EndNote under the "EndNote" tab.  The "other citation software" tab has links to other software you may use to format your bibliographies.  Some of them are web-based, so you can access your bibliography from anywhere on the web, and some of them are easier to use then EndNote and may be simpler to use for a short bibliography.

Be sure to note the information on plagiarism.  If you are caught plagiarizing someone else's work, you will be subject to academic discilpline by the Honor Committee, who can assign punishments of varying degrees, the worst of which is expulsion.

Plagiarism @ GT

"To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own: use (another's production) without crediting the source." Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Plagiarism, whether intended or not, can have serious consequences, including:

  • Failing an assignment
  • Failing a class
  • Expulsion from the university

As always, if you need help, consult a subject librarian, attend a class on plagiarism or consult the guide on the research process.

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