Documenting Sources in Academic Writing:
The What, Why, When, Where, and How of Documentation
1. What is documentation?
It is a method of giving credit to the sources of information used within a paper.
2. Why document sources?
A. To fulfill a legal and ethical obligation to identify your sources and give them credit.
B. To establish your credibility as a writer.
C. To create a trail of knowledge that other researchers can follow to find the same sources.
3. When must you document sources?
Circle which of the following must be documented within an academic essay.
A.
B.
C.
D.
E.
F.
G.
H.
Any facts, statistics, or numbers obtained from a journal article or other source
A quotation taken from a newspaper article
Common knowledge that would not be questioned
Paraphrase of the results of a study done by a professor who emailed you the results
A summary of an article or book
Personal experience you have had
Your analysis of a novel
Paraphrase of a section from a newspaper article.
Answers: A, B, D, E, H
4. Where and how do you document sources?
A. Within the Paper: When you use information from a source, you must identify that source
immediately after you quote, paraphrase, or summarize it. MLA and APA both use an
in-text citation to identify the source as in the following examples:
MLA: Author’s name and page number
(Behrens and Rosen 50)
APA: Author’s name, date, page number
(Behrens & Rosen, 2012, p. 50)
B. End of the Paper: You must provide a list of all the sources you cite within the paper,
providing the full bibliographic information for those sources so readers could access
the sources. In MLA and APA, this list is alphabetized by the author’s last name. Different
styles use different names to refer to this list; in MLA, the list is called Works Cited, and in
APA, it is References.
5. Evaluate the documentation in the following paragraph from a student paper:
Many experts on writing advise students that in general their research papers should have no
more than 10-20% quoted material. In his textbook on writing, Bruce Ballenger encourages students to
write down a quotation from a source when the author writes something that is distinctive in some way or
when restating it in different words would not do justice to the quotation. Ballenger remembered a
quotation from a scene in a documentary he saw that presented an interview with a Polish engineer on
one of the trains that took Jews to their death in World War II. The engineer said, “If you could lick my
heart, it would poison you.” Ballenger thinks it would be “stupid” to even try to paraphrase this quotation.
[The first sentence must be documented; the paraphrase of Ballenger needs to be in the student’s
own words and sentence structure, and page numbers should be provided for the paraphrase.]
Important Guidelines for Documenting and Using Information from Outside Sources
1. You must document all uses of an outside source, whether you quote the exact words of that
source or paraphrase or summarize ideas from that source.
2. To document correctly, provide in-text citations within the paper to identify the specific sources
used and then a list of sources at the end of the paper that includes all sources that you have cited.
Within the Paper: When you use information from a source, you must identify that source
immediately after you quote, paraphrase, or summarize it. MLA and APA both use in-text
citations to identify the source as in the following examples:
MLA: (Author page number)
 Many experts on writing emphasize the need for students to paraphrase and summarize
as much as possible rather than use direct quotations (Behrens and Rosen 37-38).
 Behrens and Rosen, authors of a textbook on academic writing, emphasize that writers
should use direct quotations only when they have a good reason to do so (37).
APA: (Author’s last name, copyright date, page number)
 Generally, writers should paraphrase and summarize ideas from an outside source and
quote only if they have a good reason to do so (Behrens & Rosen, 2012, p. 37).
 Behrens and Rosen (2012) emphasize that writers should use a direct quotation if the
wording of the original is important, well stated, or authoritative (pp. 38-39).
End of the Paper: You must provide a list of all the sources you cite within the paper, providing
the full bibliographic information for the sources. In MLA and APA, this list is alphabetized
by the author’s last name. Different style guides have different names for this list.
MLA: Works Cited
Behrens, Laurence, and Leonard J. Rosen. A Sequence for Academic Writing, 5th ed.
Boston: Pearson, 2012. Print.
APA: References
Behrens, L., & Rosen, L. J. (2012). A sequence for academic writing (5th ed.). Boston,
MA: Pearson.
3. Paraphrase or summarize whenever possible; quote if you have a good reason to do so.
A. Paraphrase/Summary: Restate the ideas of a source using your own words and sentence
structure; in a summary, dramatically condense the original.
 Do not merely add/delete a few words or divide a long sentence into two sentences.
 Use your own words or put a quoted phrase into your overall paraphrase/summary.
 Use your own sentence structure as much as possible.
B. Quotations: Use the exact language of the original source and put quotation marks
around that language. The following are good reasons to use quotations:
 The wording of the original is important, memorable, or hard to paraphrase.
 The wording is authoritative; an expert’s words may carry more weight than a
paraphrase of those words.