Always Credit:

• Direct quotes and paraphrased ideas

• Facts that are not common knowledge

• Ideas, thoughts, opinions and any other creation expressed by others

Do Not Credit:

• Common knowledge and accepted wisdom

• Commonly known literary, artistic, or religious works

If you're not sure, go ahead and cite it.

Citing sources is a two-part process of gathering the publishing (or bibliographic) information for each source and formatting according to the rules in the APA handbook. Learn more with this Quizziz.

Step one: 

Create a reference page of your resources.  Although this goes at the end of your paper, it's a good idea to add to this page as you locate sources.  To learn more about creating a reference page, see the APA style guide and examples.  

Also, see how Google Docs also makes it easy to create a reference page. 

Step two:

Create in-text citations within your paper as you quote or paraphrase your sources.  In APA Style this comes at the end of the quote or paraphrase and is formatted to look like this: (Author's Last Name, year published).  If there is no author, use the source title.  If there is no date write n.d. (for no date).

Each source you cite in the paper must appear in your reference list; likewise, each entry in the reference list must be cited in your text.

If using a citation generator, remember that computers make mistakes.  You are the final judge on the correctness of your citations!