Several of you have asked me about how to cite others’ work in your Google Docs. This is a great question and a very important one. The Rice Honor Code states very clearly that “any time a student draws particularly or generally from another’s work, the source should be properly credited.” And it’s important to learn this principle here at Rice, because presenting another person’s work or ideas as your own–even unintentionally or because of a sloppy mistake–can have severe repercussions on your life and career. Besides, not giving a person credit when credit is due is just wrong. So to find out how to avoid this mistake in this class, read the rest of this post.

Despite its importance, making a general set of rules about citation is difficult, because much depends on the context in which you are writing. One of our four capabilities, is Audience Awareness, which includes awareness of an audience’s “expectations.” Those expectations include what an audience expects in terms of citations, which may vary. An academic journal of medicine, for example, will expect rigorous adherence to a bibliographic style sheet (though style sheets also vary among publications), while a local newspaper might expect only that a reporter be able to produce the source for a fact-checker before her article is published.

The fact that citation styles vary based on discipline, genre, and audience is one reason why it’s always good to ask your professor about what his or her expectations are in a class at Rice. But it’s also the case that whenever you consult the work of others for this or any course–whether it be a website, an assigned book or article, or an unassigned book or article–there are three *general principles* that can serve as good guides.

1. Always include some kind of citation to the original source when you put ideas or facts you found elsewhere into your own writing. This principle is essentially just a restatement of the Rice Honor Code principle given above. Even if you are not directly quoting another author and are simply paraphrasing someone else’s idea, you must cite the original source. In the context of our class, the one exception to this rule is when you are discussing some fact that is widely accepted and known and therefore cannot be considered the intellectual property of any one person. For example, you don’t have to cite a source if you say that the Declaration of Independence was published in 1776, or George Washington died in 1799.
2. When in doubt, cite. Sometimes you may have questions about whether a fact or idea is widely accepted enough to be considered general knowledge instead of someone’s intellectual property. And, after all, as we’ve already seen in this class some things that might seem like general facts–like the date of Sacagawea’s death–are actually highly contested. In general, you should always err on the side of caution. There are some things that are so widely known that they are well-established facts or idioms; for example, even though other people have used the phrase “err on the side of caution,” I didn’t provide a citation for that because it is so widely used that it can’t be traced to any one person. Nonetheless, whenever you have doubts about whether something should be cited, it is usually best to cite first and ask questions later. When in doubt, cite.
3. Direct quotations from another text must always be enclosed in quotation marks. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth stressing and also worth remembering when you are taking notes out of another text. Don’t get lazy and tell yourself that you’ll remember what is a direct quote and what is not. Always, always, always make clear, in your notes and in your written work, when you are quoting directly from someone else’s words. In addition to providing quotation marks around direct quotes, it should be clear from the context of the quote or from the citation who is responsible for the original wording.

Now let me talk about how to apply those three principles in this class. As the Rice Honor Code also states, “What is meant by proper crediting is left to the discretion of the professor.”

Actually, as I’ve explained above, a better way of putting that principle would be to say that proper crediting usually depends on the kind of writing you are doing and the context in which you are writing. Proper crediting in a newspaper doesn’t require footnotes, for instance; but proper crediting in a scholarly book or article does. So to know how to apply the three principles above, you always need to consider the specific circumstances of your writing. That means that the forms of citation that I consider proper for your weekly writing assignments may not be what another professor accepts as proper crediting, so always clarify with your professor what counts as proper crediting in a particular course.

When you are writing in your Google Docs for this course, there are generally three kinds of sources that you will probably find yourself wanting to cite:

1. Assigned readings that are on the schedule. In these cases, all you need to do is provide, in parentheses, the name of the author(s) of the assigned reading and the page number where you located the idea, argument, or quotation that you want to cite in your post. (Notice how I did it in the second reading question last week.) Since I’ll know which article or book you are referring to in these cases, you don’t need to provide more extensive bibliographic information like you would if you were writing a research paper. But if you are actually citing another person who is not a main author of the work cited but whose ideas are discussed by the author of the assigned text, make clear within your writing that you are really referring not to the authors in parentheses, but to the other person referred to in the article or the book. For example, if I wanted to refer to an argument made by Grace Hebard that I found in the Thomas Slaughter article, I would need to say “As Grace Hebard argued …” and then cite the source for her argument in the Slaughter article.
2. Websites you find online. When you are writing a blog post, you may find something online through Googling that you want to refer to in your post. In this case, an acceptable way to cite the other Website would be to highlight some part of your text that draws on the website and turn that text into a link. For example, several times in this post I have cited the Rice Honor Code, and to indicate the source of the quotations I’ve given, I simply turned “Rice Honor Code” into a link to the webpage where I got the quotes. Ideally, though, even if you provide a link it should be clear from the text whom you are crediting with the idea or quotation. That’s why I always prefaced my quotes from the Rice Honor Code by making clear that’s where I was getting the quote. It’s also important to check to make sure that the link you are giving is to a “persistent” URL. Sometimes when you use a database or search engines online, the database will create session-specific URLs for the articles you find, meaning that the URL will not work after you close your browser. In such cases, the database will usually provide you with a link to the “persistent URL” or “permalink” for the article; that’s the one you want to cite.
3. Books or articles you find in the library or outside of class. Whenever you want to cite a book or article that is not an assigned reading in this class, the first thing to do is include the same kinds of parenthetical references that you provide when drawing on assigned texts. But in this case, an author and page number alone won’t necessarily tell me or other readers where you got your information. So at the bottom of your post, you can include a brief “works cited” list that gives the full bibliographic information (e.g., author, title of book, article or journal, place of publication, publisher, and date) for any non-assigned books or articles that you cited in the post. You may have learned how to use a particular style manual like MLA, APA, or Chicago in high school. Feel free to use one of those methods or some other method that you feel comfortable with; for these weekly assignments, I’m not going to be a stickler for style manuals, so long as it’s possible for me or any reader to figure out all the bibliographic information from the citation you give.

These are general guidelines you should follow unless told otherwise. There may be weekly writing assignments where I ask you to vary your citation practices based on the audience you are writing for, so be alert to specific instructions if I give them.

I hope this helps. If not, then let me add another general principle when it comes to citation: When in doubt, ask!