Information Ethics
After completing this tutorial you will
- Know what types of information need citation
- Understand three basic citation styles: MLA, APA and CSE
- Be aware of the places to go for detailed information on creating citations
This tutorial will take about five to ten minutes to complete. View the videos and follow the 4 Steps shown below.
Step 1
Info Literacy – When and How to Cite - 2:50 minutes
Copyright is the legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work. (American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed.)
So if you made it, only you can legally produce it and profit from it — whether it's a book, poem, song, photograph, or other creative work. And as soon as you make your creative work, you automatically have copyright of it. You don't have to do anything.
When someone has made a creative work that you want to use in your own work, you need to correctly cite it.
This tutorial gives basic information on how to cite other people’s work.
Step 2
Citation Styles - 3:18 minutes
Different disciplines follow different rules when citing the work of others correctly. These sets of rules are called citation styles. Each uses the same information about the source, but the information is presented in a different order, depending on the citation style.
Your professor will tell you which citation style to use for your papers, either in the syllabus or in the assignment itself.
This video shows Ronald White’s A. Lincoln: A Biography in different citation formats.
Step 3
Useful Links
Below are some websites related to information ethics that you may want to visit.
Copyright and Use:
Avoiding Plagiarism:
- Academic Dishonesty: Plagiarism (Oregon State University)
- Avoiding Plagiarism & How to Avoid Plagiarism (Northwestern University)
- Avoiding Plagiarism: Mastering the Art of Scholarship PDF (University of California--Davis)
- How Not to Plagiarize (University of Toronto)
- Paraphrase: Write It in Your Own Words (Purdue University)
- Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It (Indiana University)
- What is Plagiarism? (Georgetown University)
Citation and Style Manuals Online:
Step 4
Providing Feedback
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