Citations and Openness: A Guide to Students Writing Success

Citing sources is easily the most difficult and annoying aspect of any research paper. Commas, periods, dates, and italics. What is the order of everything? What do I do if there are multiple authors? What do I do if its a book online? This is too hard to decide. Students these days don’t know how to properly cite their sources. Believe me I know, cause well I am one of those students who before this past semester couldn't cite anything properly.

Lets start off with what is a proper source, for there is certain criteria that needs to be met. Accuracy, authority, ownership, currency, objectivity, and purpose; all important values of a great article. Is the article out of date, does it still have relevance? Does the source have a respectable author, is it not some blogger posting his ideas (that sounds familiar)? All of these criteria are critical to a credible source.

The hardest part about being a student looking for a great source to use is finding scholarly articles. Man are those hard to come by. However, there are great resources like google schoolar or other databases that search only for these type of articles. Also you can customize your search based on date, relevance, pattens, and more.

Another trick to being successful in citations and proper finding of sources is openness. Ask questions. Be resourceful. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. From experience not knowing how to source properly you can’t make it up and say “looks close enough”. This stuff matters, take the time to do it properly.