COMP 4420
Citations – p. 1/19

Academic Honesty.
Plagiarism.
Proper citation.
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U of M Academic Calendar: Section 8: ‘Academic Integrity’ http://bit.ly/q217HW
To plagiarize is to take ideas or words of another person and pass them off as one’s own. In short, it is stealing something intangible rather than an object . . .
Obviously it is not necessary to state the source of well known or easily verifiable facts, but students are expected to appropriately acknowledge the sources of ideas and expressions they use in their written work, whether quoted directly or paraphrased. This applies to diagrams, statistical tables and the like, as well as to written material, and materials or information from Internet sources.
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More from Section 8: http://bit.ly/q217HW
To provide adequate and correct documentation is not only an indication of academic honesty but is also a courtesy which enables the reader to consult these sources with ease. Failure to provide appropriate citations constitutes plagiarism.
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Is there a clear definition of ‘well known or easily verifiable facts’?
Who will be reading your work?
Examples in computer science?
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“appropriately acknowledge the sources of ideas and expressions”
Two categories:
Stealing an expression.
Stealing an idea.
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Copying the words directly from a source without noting that this is a direct quote.
Copying the words, paraphrasing slightly.
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Pretending an idea as if it were yours, without citation.
Don’t make it sound like an idea is yours if you know it is someone else’s idea.
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If you use a figure from someone else’s work, you should cite it as well.
Use the caption for the figure to cite the source.
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J. Baltes and J. Anderson, Advancing
Artificial Intelligence through Minimalist
Humanoid Robots, in D. Liu et al. (Eds.):
Design and Control of Intelligent Robotic
Systems, SCI 177 (2009), 355–376.
What if you wrote . . . ?
“Baltes and Anderson [1] give several crucial reasons why minimal robots are important for advancing artificial intelligence (AI) research. One is affordability, and the practical benefits that working with affordable research components brings to a lab. A second reason is practicality: even in cases where robots have great (but expensive) additions, these may not be used in robots contests, either because these devices are not important for the current task, or because integrating several senses and controls is complex.”
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How to phrase citations in a text?
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Make it clear what your citation is about.
Discussing in terms of the authors of the paper can make the reference more clear:
“Comparison-based sorting algorithms have a lower bound of Ω( n log n
) [1].”
“Ford and Johnson [1] proved that any comparison-based sorting algorithm must run in time
Ω( n log n
) .”
[1] L. Ford and S. Johnson, A Tournament Problem,
American Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959) 387–389.
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Why? Makes it clear what is the citation.
As sentences and paragraphs get longer, what is covered by the citation becomes unclear.
Example?
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In the text, always use last names only:
Yes: Ford and Johnson
No: L. Ford and S. Johnson
No: L. Ford and Johnson etc.
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Keep the order of the authors from the original paper.
# authors Citation format
0
1
2
≥ 3
Example
Name [cite] Turing [3] . . .
Name1 and Name2 [cite] Ford and Johnson [2] . . .
Name1 et al. [cite] Cormen et al. [1] . . .
[1] T. Cormen, C. Leiserson, R. Rivest and C. Stein, Introduction to
Algorithms (3rd ed.), MIT Press, 2009.
[2] L. Ford and S. Johnson, A Tournament Problem, American
Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959) 387–389.
[3] A. Turing, On computable numbers, Proceedings of the London
Mathematical Society, Series 2, 42 (1937) 230–265.
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Don’t use a citation as a part of your sentence.
You should be able to read your sentence out loud without the citation number and the sentence should still make sense.
Example:
No: “[1] proves that the optimal algorithm .. ”
No: “In [1], it is proved that the optimal algorithm .. ”
(bad for other reasons, too!)
No: “The paper [1] proves that the optimal algorithm
.. ”
Yes: “AuthorName [1] proves that the optimal algorithm .. ”
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Don’t cite a whole book for one page or section.
Cite individual page(s) or sections.
Example
No: “(see Cormen et al. [1] for an introduction to dynamic programming)”
Yes: “(see Cormen et al. [Ch. 15, 1] for an introduction to dynamic programming)”
[1] T. Cormen, C. Leiserson, R. Rivest and C. Stein,
Introduction to Algorithms (3rd ed.), MIT Press, 2009.
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When citing several papers by the same author, give citations as a list:
No: “AwesomeAuthor [1][2][3] proved that .. ”
Yes: “AwesomeAuthor [1,2,3] proved that .. ”
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Best solution: use L A TEX and bibtex.
Otherwise:
Journals: authors, article title, journal name, volume, year and pages.
Books: authors, booktitle, publisher, year.
Web resources: author if available, title if available,
URL, date last accessed.
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