While some college assignments may require you to write about your own feelings and experiences, most writing projects will require you to evaluate and incorporate the work of others into your own research. Academic writers draw on previous research and writing both to locate their ideas among a field of established work, and to distinguish their ideas from those of others within the same field. Whenever you refer to the work of other authors, either to their ideas or to their exact words, you must give proper credit to your sources. Using someone else's ideas, work, or words as your own without giving them proper credit constitutes plagiarism, whether intentional or not.

Giving proper credit involves using footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies. This is called documentation. The following are examples of the major styles of documentation used in academic writing. Connecting to these pages will bring you off the Library's site. Use your browser's BACK button to return to the Information Literacy Web. You can also use the complete style manuals in the library.

• Farmingdale State Electronic Citation Guide for APA & MLA
  Maintained by Greenley Library, this page outlines how to cite electronic resources such as websites, articles in online databases, listservs, and email.
• APA and MLA styles,
  from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Writer's Workshop.
• Chicago/Turabian Style of Documentation,
  from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center.
• APA, MLA, and Turabian Style of Documentation,
  from the University of Southern Mississippi Library. Scroll down to Style Guides.
• Citing Web Resources By Lafayette College.