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Academic Writing Guide

Your guide to academic, scholarly, and professional writing in your health care career.

Academic Writing Guide

Introduction

It is critical for you to understand why sources need to be cited and to know how to cite sources appropriately. By citing sources incorporated into your work, you are doing two important things related to research: (a) giving proper credit to others for their ideas, and (b) providing a roadmap for those readers who want to learn more about the topic you have written about. Failure to cite your sources correctly or to give credit to others appropriately is plagiarism!

Why Should I Cite My Sources?

  1. Credibility and Trust: Citations show that you've done thorough research and are backing up your arguments with reliable sources
  2. Avoiding Plagiarism: Properly citing sources helps you avoid plagiarism, which is the unethical practice of using someone else's work without giving them credit
  3. Supporting Your Arguments: Citations provide evidence for your claims, making your arguments stronger and more convincing
  4. Acknowledging Others' Work: Giving credit to the original authors shows respect for their contributions and acknowledges their work
  5. Guiding Readers: Citations help readers find the original sources if they want to explore the topic further

How Do I Cite My Sources?

  • Various styles and formats - over 3,000 of them!
  • Which one you use depends on the requirements of your instructor or publisher
  • APA and AMA are the two used most commonly in health and medicine

What Do I Need to Cite?

  • Direct Quotes: Whenever you use the exact words from a source, you must use quotation marks and provide a citation.
  • Paraphrased Information: Even if you put someone else's ideas into your own words, you still need to cite the original source.
  • Summarized Information: Summarizing the main points of a source also requires a citation.
  • Data and Statistics: Any specific data, statistics, or figures that you did not generate yourself must be cited.
  • Ideas and Theories: If you refer to someone else's ideas, theories, or interpretations, you need to give them credit.
  • Images, Tables, Charts, and Figures: If you didn’t personally create it, give credit where it is due.

The Four Parts of Citations

All citations consist of the following main parts, but the arrangement of the parts – and the punctuation used to separate them – changes based on which citation format is used.

Part Description
Author(s) Each citation format varies in how they want the author's name(s) to appear (and how many names should be included).
Date Usually, this is just the year of publication, but some resources use "MM DD YYYY" or "DD MM YYYY" formats. The location of this element varies widely and can even appear in the middle of the "Source or Container" part.
Title This is the title of the actual document – whether it is a research article, systematic review, book, website, or video.
Source or Container This is the parent material (i.e., "bucket") that holds the actual item (e.g., the journal volume/issue in which the research article was published or the website where the video was found). This section will vary the most based on the type of resource and/or the selected citation style format.

Let's review a couple of examples.

A journal article citation will look like the following in APA format:

Jerrentrup, A., Mueller, T., Glowalla, U., Herder, M., Henrichs, N., Neubauer, A., & Schaefer, J. R. (2018). Teaching medicine with the help of “Dr. House.” PLoS ONE, 13(3), Article e0193972. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193972

The citation looks fairly similar in AMA format, but major changes include the relocation of the Date field and the usage of different punctuation.

Jerrentrup A, Mueller T, Glowalla U, Herder M, Henrichs N, Neubauer A, Schaefer JR. Teaching medicine with the help of “Dr. House.” PLoS ONE. 2018;13(3):Article e0193972. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0193972