Physics 3730/6720 Citing Sources in a Report

Academic scholarship has important rules for giving credit for the ideas and results of others and for citing sources of information. When you write a report, it is important that you cite the sources of both ideas and data. For ideas and data, you should give credit to the original authors. For data, it is also important to cite the source in case others want to check your work.

Copying the work of others without attribution and offering it as your own is considered plagiarism and a violation of the rules of academic scholarship. Plagiarism is also a violation of University policy and can result in academic sanctions, so it is important to know what it is and how to avoid it.

When you write a report and use ideas from another source, you should add the source to a list of sources in an end-note bibliography. There is a common-knowledge exception to this rule: If you are quoting one of Newton's laws, you won't need a bibliographic citation -- just say it came from Newton -- everyone knows about it. But when in doubt, it is safest to cite the source. The bibliographic items at the end of your report must be assigned a key (usually a number), and you should cite that key in the text close to the sentence that uses that idea. It is not sufficient simply to list all of your sources as end-notes. The citation keys must appear in the text. In this course please use the tools in LaTeX to make the bookkeeping and formatting easy.

In this course, there is no reason to copy whole paragraphs or even whole sentences from another source. Paraphrasing is close to copying. Paraphrasing is copying large passages and just changing a few words or phrases. This is also not permitted in this course. Instead, you should read, think about, and understand your source, then set it aside, explain the ideas your own words, and then cite the source of the ideas. On the other hand, copying equations, figures, and tables from another source is fine as long as you provide proper citation. If you are publishing your report, you may need to get permission from the publisher or author to copy figures. If an equation is common knowledge, such as E = mc², then you won't need a citation.

What is the proper style for a bibliographic citation? In this course, please use the Physical Review D style for publications, as explained in Table I of the Physical Review Style Guide . That guide doesn't cover web sources. For them, please provide the following information: Author, Page Title (or Document Title), URL, (Date Accessed: Date)

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