I would like to take a moment to discuss why I made this webquest. I've seen first hand how difficult it can be to understand that just because information is on the Internet, that doesn't mean it is free to use. Too often I've seen students copy and paste information into an essay without a second thought of what they were doing. What citations help students do is avoid plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the taking of someone else's ideas and passing them off as one's own. Plagiarism can have detrimental consequences to an individual's career or academic life. At the least, a student could receive a zero for copying someone else's work. At the worst, a person could be sued for a cash settlement or sent to prison, depending on the severity of the plagiarism.
This is why we use citations. A student is typically allowed to use someone else's thoughts and ideas in an essay, but they must provide where they got that information. Most students don't take the next crucial steps to create a citation for a source (both in-text and works cited).
From this last section, we should know how to create in-text citations, so most of the difficult part is complete. Now, we move on to create our final citations. Click the button below for creating a citation.