When you do research for a paper or project, you need to site or document your sources. Your sources are the materials in which you found the information that you used. It does not matter what type of source it is. It can be in print or online. It can be an image or a conversation. It can be copyrighted or not. Some examples of sources are magazines, newspapers, books, interviews, music, websites, videos, charts or graphs. I could go on and on, but you get the idea. All of these sources were created by someone. Each work belongs to the person who created it. The work is that person's intellectual property. When you find a useful bit of information, you may be thinking, wait, I found this on the internet. It was free. Why do I need to site it? Remember, it does not matter where you got the information. It does not matter if you paid for it or not. It does matter that you're using someone else's intellectual property. That's why you always have to document your sources. When you document your sources, you give credit to the person whose ideas you used. You need to give credit when you use an author's exact words and when you summarize or rewrite their ideas. Not giving credit makes it seem like the ideas are your own. If someone used your work, you'd want to get credit for it too. Using information from other people without crediting them is called plagiarism. Another reason to site is to allow your reader to find your sources for their own use. For example, they may want to read one of your sources to learn even more about the topic. Finally, citing sources lends authority to your work and lets your teachers know that you did your research. Knowing that you got your ideas from experts makes your argument or case stronger. So now that you know you need to site your sources, let's find out how to do it. To site means to identify the sources you used in your work. Basically, you write down the details that will help someone else find the source. For example, if you're using the book The Honey Bee's Hive, you'll need to record or write down the following details from the title page and the verso or back of the title page. The author, Joyce Markovix, the complete title, The Honey Bee's Hive, a thriving city, the publisher, bearport publishing, and the publication date, 2010. For internet sources, you'll need to include additional information such as the title of the web page and the URL. For example, if you used information from this National Geographic Kids website, the title of the web pages 10 Facts about Honey Bee's, and this is the URL. All of the details for one source are called a citation. There are two places where you might include citations in your paper. Your teacher may require you to give credit for specific ideas and quotations within your paper. This is called in-text citation, and it lists the author's last name and the page number where the information was found in the source. Let's take a look at this example from a research paper that uses a quote from the book The Honey Bee's Hive by Joyce Markovix. It takes billions of bees to pollinate California's almond crop each year, which is a tremendous job to manage. In the words of Joe Trainer, a beekeeper, you're really relieved when it's all over. Markovix 26. Notice the in-text citation. It includes the author's last name, Markovix, and the page number of the quote, 26, enclosed in parentheses. For any research project, you must always include an alphabetized list of all of the sources you used. This list is called a bibliography or work-sided, and it provides complete information for each source. Sometimes you may find a citation at the end of an article that you found in a library database or in an online encyclopedia, but most of the time you'll need to make your own citations. There are rules for creating proper citations like what source details must be included and what order to put them in. Citations maker on Ossless will help you create your citations and your work-sided list. That way you don't have to memorize the complicated rules. Citations maker makes it easy. It is important to cite the sources you use in your research. Do it right. CITE For specific examples and for more information about this topic and the entire research process, explore Ossless. Thank you to Bareport Publishing for granting permission to use their book in this video. Ossless Learn to Research Research to Learn