DOCUMENTATING YOUR SOURCES

The code of academic honesty states that you must give credit every time you use someone else's ideas or exact words. The information below is presented to help you avoid charges of plagiarism and to learn how to cite sources accurately.

The discipline of Sociology generally uses the American Psychological Association citation format, known as APA. You can find detailed information about APA documentation, with examples of student papers, through Diana Hacker's on-line resource at http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/social_sciences/intext.html .If you have any questions about correct documentation, this is the place to look.

For your convenience, I provide samples below of the general types of citations you need to use in SOC 204. Please learn these and apply them accurately. You will be strongly penalized for a failure to provide appropriate citations.

A. In-text citations:

When writing your reaction papers and your take-home essays, you will be referring to the ideas of authors you have read. Sometimes you will paraphrase these ideas (put them in your own words). At other times, you may wish to use a direct quotation. For direct quotations, place in a parenthesis the author's last name, followed by a comma, followed by the year of the publication, followed by a comma, followed by p. followed by the page number. If the quotation is taken from more than one page, use "pp." instead of "p." Appropriate sentence punctuation follows the closed parenthesis. Like this: (Schwalbe, 2001, p. 45). The only difference for a paraphrase is that you do not put in the reference to a specific page. See the next section for specific examples.

1. How to reference quotations:

Generally introduce a quotation with a phrase such as ---According to Jones (1999, p. 33), and then follow with the quotation. Don’t just "plop" a quotation in as evidence of something you are trying to argue. Give the quotation a context, and make it flow well with the rest of the sentence. You will find useful information about how often to quote in the section below on plagiarism.

Use ellipses ( . . .) when omitting anything within a quotation: three spaced periods for omission before or within the quotation, four spaced periods if a new sentence follows an ellipsis.

Example:

In social scientific research, there is virtually no limit to . . . the units of analysis. . . .Social scientists perhaps most typically choose individual people as their units of analysis (Babbie, 1999, p. 75).

Quotations exceeding three lines of text are presented as a block, indented five spaces, and single spaced. (Although the example above is not three lines, that is the way a longer quotation would be presented). Many APA style guides now recommend that these blocked quotations be double- spaced. For this course, you should single space the quotations (to save paper). No quotation marks are used on block quotes. In addition to making the paper more readable, this practice highlights ideas that you want to stand out.

2. How to give credit for a paraphrase:

When you use someone else's ideas, even though you do not quote them, you must still give credit. When you write, clearly indicate where the other author's ideas begin and end. Introduce paraphrases with a few words that identify them and set them in context. The example below shows the difference between a paraphrase and a quotation.

Paraphrase:

In his book, The Basics of Social Research, Earl Babbie tells us that exploratory research helps us to learn more about an unfamiliar subject, but he claims that it isn’t very good at explaining what we discover (Babbie, 1999).

Quotation:

Babbie points out the advantages and disadvantages of exploratory research. In his book, The Basics of Social Research, he says that

Exploratory studies are. . .essential whenever a researcher is breaking new ground, and they can almost always yield new insights into a topic for research. . . .The chief shortcoming of exploratory studies is that they seldom provide satisfactory answers to research questions, though they can hint at the answers and can give insights into the research methods that could provide definitive answers (Babbie, 1999, p. 73).

3. In-text citations from Mapping the Social Landscape:

Susan Ferguson is the editor of our course reader Mapping the Social Landscape. With the exception of some introductions to the articles, Ferguson is not the author of any of the pieces. So, when you cite articles from this text, you must use the name of the author associated with the specific article you are referencing. For example, if you are quoting something from article # 2 Teenage Wasteland by Donna Gaines, your citation would say (Gaines, 1990/2002, p. ____).

4. In-text citations from videos we see in class

You may wish to paraphrase or quote something from one of the in-class videos. In this case, put the name of the producer and/or director, followed by the date. You would then put the full information in your bibliographic reference at the end of your paper.

B. Bibliographic references

The final section of a paper must be a "Works Cited" or "Bibliography" or "References" page. Works cited refers to the sources you actually quoted or paraphrased in the paper. A Bibliography can include additional works you used during your research but did not use explicitly in the paper.

For a short assignment such as a reaction paper, you can simply provide the full bibliographic information at the beginning of the paper (if you are responding to only one source), or at the end of the paper under the heading: "Works Cited."

Single space each reference and double space between entries. While some guides insist that you double-space reference, I do not require that. You will not be wrong if you use double-spacing, however. Arrange the references alphabetically by the last name of the first author and chronologically for two or more titles by the same author.

1. Course lecture notes:

If you paraphrase or quote material from course lectures, you should cite this as follows.
Powers, Rosemary. (2003). General Sociology. Lecture notes, ___date___, 2003..

2. The Ferguson Anthology. You will use this one most!

In the bibliography, you need to provide information both about the article you are referencing and the anthology itself. Use this as a template, and simply change the author, date, title, and page numbers to reflect the article you are using. If you use articles from this anthology for your take-home tests, you must also include the anthology itself as a separate entry (without the information about the articles) when presenting your bibliography. You see that the original date of the article is included in the date section--this is not always done, but for this course, I want you to show that you can place these writings historically, even though the editor has gathered them together recently.

Gaines, Donna. (1990/2002). Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead-End Kids. In Susan J. Ferguson (Ed.), Mapping the Social Landscape., Third Edition. (pp. 7 - 20). Boston: McGraw Hill.

3. For chapters of other course texts:

For Scwalbe's The Sociologically Examined Life and the autobiography by Melba Pattillo Beals Warriors Don't Cry, you should follow this form. Simply change the page numbers to refer to what portion you are covering in your paper.

Schwalbe, Michael. (2001). The Sociologically Examined Life: Pieces of the Conversation. Second Edition. (pp. ______). Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company.

Beales, Melba Pattilo. (1994). Warriors Don’t Cry. (pp. _____). Pocket Books, Simon and Shuster.

4. For videos we will be viewing

Here is the bibliographic information you will need:

Alvarez, Louis and Andrew Kolker, Producers/Directors. [Videotape]. (2001). People Like Us. PBS documentary.

Garmon, Linda, Producer and Director. [Videotape]. (1994). Secret of the Wild Child. Boston, MA: WGBH Educational Foundation .

Pool, Lea, Director. [Videotape]. (1997). The Gender Tango. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences

Zimbardo,Philip, Producer/Director. [Videotape]. (1991). Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prision Experiment. California: Philip Zimbardo.

5. For articles accessed through EBSCO host or other on-line data bases

a. On-Line databases

For more information, see Carbone, Nick. (2000). Writing Online: A Student’s Guide to the Internet and the World Wide Web, Third Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. The following paragraphs are taken from pp. 139- 140 of this text.

Online databases, both full-text and bibliographic, can be accessed via a web browser. Quite often access to these databases is limited to students, faculty, and staff whose school library subscribes to them. When you access an online database, hou will often find a document number associated with the article. If such a number or notation exists, include that in your citation. Finally, for proprietary online databases – those that charge our library or academic department a fee –don’t give a URL. . . . If the database offers access to anyone, such as ERIC or the U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFInder, give the URL to the homepage of the database. Our readers can use the author’s name, article title, date and document number (if applicable) to find the same source, much the way people use similar information to guide their search through a library’s online catalog.

Database open to all:

U.S. Census Bureau. (1990). Quick table P-1A: Age and sex of total population: 1990, Hartford-Middletown, CT. (Online, follow links Population and Housing Facts, then Quick Tables). U.S. Census Bureau, American FactFinder. Retrieved on June 10, 1000 from the World Wide Web: http://factfinder.census.gov/

Limited-access database

(such as EOU’s subscription sources EBSCO Host Academic Search Elite, Contemporary Women’s Issues)

It’s best not to include a URL for a link to a limited-access database because the URL will be invalid for anyone who doesn’t access the database from an Internet account offered by your school or workplace. Give the name of your school library and the city and state within the explanatory brackets so that your readers will know how you accessed the database. Do not add a period after the itemnumber assigned to the work by the service.

Current example:

Witt, S. (Summer, 1997). Parental influence on children’s socialization to gender roles. Adolescence. 32(126). [Online information service accessed via Eastern Oregon University Pierce Library, La Grande, OR]. Retrieved November 5, 2003 from EBSCO Host, Academic Search Elite.

b. Internet Sources:

The Internet is developing into a common and convenient source for student research projects. However, if you use such sources, you must be careful to evaluate the academic worth and the sites you find and also will need to know how to document these sites. Universities and professional associations have begun to develop standard procedures for documenting Internet resources, but you will find some conflicting requirements. If you are not sure that the source you are using is an academic one, check with me.

For this course you should provide the following information:

1. Author (Do not use Internet sites without an author listed unless your professor approves this use).

2. Date of publication if given --or your date of access if no date is given.

3. Title of the work

4. Publication information (if available—look at bottom of page for possible copyright)

5. Paragraph number if using a direct quotation: Cite the paragraph number if there is no page number, and so your in-text citation would look like this: (Peterson, 1999, para. 10). Then you would put all the other information about the source in your works cited page.

6. Type of source, set in brackets with date of retrieval [Online, Retrieved January 15 from the World Wide Web: followed by the URL, with no final period].