You'll often hear your faculty members (and librarians) say it's important to cite your sources. But why do they say this so often? It didn't seem to matter so much when you wrote papers before unless you were directly quoting something, but now your professor wants you to cite even if you are paraphrasing or summarizing the source. So what gives?
Well, it goes without saying, that you are doing a higher level of research and writing in college, so the expectations are going to be higher as well. Additionally, when you were writing those papers in the past, you were often provided a set of sources where you could find your information. In this way, your instructor created a curated reference list for you and they knew where you would be getting your information from. If your facts didn't align to information from the provided resources, your instructor knew that you had not gotten it from a source they shared.
At the college level, your instructor isn't providing sources so they have no quick way of knowing that you are accurately representing information from the resources without you citing it- even if you aren't directly quoting it and are only paraphrasing or summarizing information that you've learned from it. Additionally, by citing, you are providing credit to the authors/originators of the idea and avoiding plagiarism, wherein you take credit for someone else's work.
So why else does citation matter?
Aside from showing your instructor where you got your information and giving your sources credit, it also provides a trail of where you got your evidence so if someone wanted to review your work and reproduce your results, they could. They could follow your citations, recreate your research and, ideally, reproduce the same conclusions that you did. This is how an article is peer-reviewed and is an important part of the academic review process.
Plagiarism and citations are often mentioned together. Plagiarism is the practice of taking others' work or ideas and passing them off as your own. There are several different kinds of plagiarism including: complete plagiarism, verbatim plagiarism, paraphrasing plagiarism, patchwork plagiarism, and self plagiarism.
Complete plagiarism is taking someone else's entire work and passing it off as your as your own. For example, taking a classmate's paper and submitting it to the dropbox claiming it as your own is a case of complete plagiarism. You have taken their entire work and claimed it as yours with no proper accreditation.
Verbatim plagiarism is when you directly copy parts of an another person's work without giving them credit. While other parts of the paper may contain your own original thoughts and ideas, there are sections in the paper that you directly lifted from a particular source without proper citation.
Paraphrasing plagiarism is similar to verbatim plagiarism in that it involves taking another person's work without giving them credit, but instead of directly copying it, you are paraphrasing it. This means that you are rephrasing someone else's ideas as your own without crediting the originals.
Patchwork plagiarism refers to taking parts of several different works and "stitching" them together to form a cohesive paragraph without crediting any of the original creators. Sometimes, this form of plagiarism is paired with verbatim plagiarism with each individual statement being a direct statement taken from each of the individual works leading to a "patchwork quilt" of writing that involves none of the student's original work.
Self plagiarism is when you reuse your own past work. This is most often detrimental when recycling the same exact paper for multiple different assignments.
Librarians have mixed feelings on citation generators.
On one hand, they are a useful tool for providing a starting point if you are brand new to the world of citations. Even an incorrect or incomplete citation is better than none at all.
HOWEVER! Citation generators aren't perfect. They are only as good as the information entered into them (whether by you or by the site where you got an article) and they aren't always smart enough to know how to correctly apply rules of a particular citation style. They often leave in formatting mistakes that can cost you points.
Something else to consider is how much time you are going to spend in academics (particularly if pursuing a Masters or PhD). The more courses you plan to take, the more you should be able to build your own citation. You don't need to know all the specifics of APA or Chicago Manual of Style, but you should know the basics of how to cite a journal article and a chapter out of a book--two of the items you will most frequently cite.
Our recommendation is that if you use a citation generator, you always check the entries it creates. If you aren't sure what a correct citation should look like, refer back to your current citation manual or the library's citation guide. Do not directly copy and paste results from a citation generator without proofreading to ensure they are accurate according to the rules of your citation system.