6th Grade Language Arts Celebrations Research: Source Documentation

Why Do We Cite Our Sources?

When you conduct research, you use information and facts from a variety of sources to support your own ideas and to help you develop new ones. Books, articles, videos, interviews, and web sites are some examples of sources you might use.  Citing your sources allows you:

• to show you've done proper research by listing sources you used to get information
• to be responsible scholars by giving credit to other researchers and acknowledging their ideas
• to avoid plagiarism by quoting words and ideas used by other authors
• to help readers track down the sources you used by citing them accurately in your bibliography