CITATION STANDARDS FOR TAKE-HOME ESSAYS, REPORTS, AND PAPERS IN SETZLER COURSES

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Unless you have received written instructions to the contrary, any paper submitted in my classes that fails to include properly formatted citations will be marked down. Please follow these guidelines:

  • Without exception, instances of plagiarism will be reported to the Dean's office and punished according to university policy. Plagiarism is any act where a student attempts to gain academic credit by representing as their own writing and ideas work that has been copied or paraphrased from the work of another author, the internet, or another student. 

    If ideas and writing in your essay are not your own, they need to have proper citation. If any phrasing in your writing is being lifted directly from another source, you must put quotation marks around it and include a page-specific citation.

    You also must cite material when you are paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is when writers borrow ideas from another author, substantially reworking that author's wording and ideas to use them in their own essay. Writers should enclose paraphrased materials with references that note their true author. For example: As the historian Michelle Smith notes, plagiarism is the leading form of academic plagiarism in American colleges (2012, 34). In this case, the beginning of the borrowed idea is denoted by a reference to its author, and it is clearly terminated with a citation listing the year of the author's work (which would be cited fully in the bibliography) and the page number on which this idea was located in the cited work.

  • Do not "patchwrite." Patchwriting is when an author takes phrases, sentences, or even whole paragraphs from another writer, selectively substituting some of the words with synonyms but otherwise completely replicating the meaning and exact structure of the original author. Patchwriting amounts to copying another writer largely verbatim, but without quotation marks to indicate this has been done. The practice is intellectually dishonest and a violation of the honor code because it amounts to deceptively presenting another person's work as though it were your own writing.

  • For take-home examinations or papers, please use only the assigned reading materials to write your essay unless specifically told otherwise. With the singular exception of writing assignments that are supposed to involve independent research, I evaluate the content and analysis of essays based on the degree to which they cover the assigned materials. For reference purposes, you may find it occasionally useful to examine academic journal articles or books other than those that have been assigned; however, you may not substitute similar readings for your assigned materials. In no case should you rely on an encyclopedia, web sites, or similar materials in lieu of using your essay to demonstrate your understanding of assigned readings.

  • You must provide a complete listing of all sources used in your essays. Unless you are using footnotes that provide complete citations, your essay must include either a "Bibliography" or "Works Cited" section even if you have used only one source.

  • You must provide page-specific citations throughout your essay. All materials used to write your papers should be cited throughout your essay, even if an essay incorporates only the required class readings and does not quote any material directly. You must provide citations with the page numbers of the source when:

    • You use direct quotes or data;

    • You are paraphrasing materials (i.e., putting the ideas of other authors into your own language);

    • You need to support your argument by demonstrating that other experts have reached the same conclusion.

  • You must appropriately format and punctuate your citations and bibliography. Please do not make up your own citation style. In lower-division courses, unless the directions on an assignment specifically indicate otherwise, you may use APSA, Chicago, APA, or MLA formatting as long as you are consistent in your format choice throughout your paper. Unless otherwise stated, you must use the American Political Science Association format for all take-home essays in my upper-division courses. For your convenience, I have provided a webpage handout on the APSR format of citation on the class website. You may also want to review Gregory Scott and Stephen Garrison's chapter, "Citing Sources" from The Political Science Writer's Manual.

  • You must cite lecture materials in the rare instances that you have to use them in your essay. If you use material from lectures, you must cite this material (Setzler lecture, October 11, 2001). Whenever possible, however, you should cite material from specific pages in your assigned readings rather than the class lectures. Part of political science’s claim to being a “science” is the idea that the work of social scientists can be easily replicated by others. When you cite a source that is generally available and provide your readers with the best information about where they can get the document you are citing, other individuals can verify and trust your interpretation of these materials. You should not cite me unless you have to because this material is not something that can be easily accessed by most people.

  • When you have any doubts about how to properly cite a source or format your bibliography, always consult a style book. Do not give up just because formatting your citation and bibliographies properly is hard at first. Over time, you will learn how to consistently and correctly provide and format citations. The sooner you acquire these skills, the easier major research projects will be to complete. If you need additional help or resources, you have lots of options: see me, my webpage handout on the APSR format of citation, a writing manual chapter on citation I have placed on the website, or a Smith Library reference librarian so that you can obtain a style guide in the library.

  • You must use proper citation and pagination for electronic sources and class reading materials. The point of citation is to make sure that other people can verify your interpretation of other scholars' work. Thus, as a rule, you want to cite materials such that they could be located by the largest audience possible. When using on-line assignments from the class website or materials obtained from the library reserves, you should list the original pagination of the cited materials if it is available:

To cite a photocopied or scanned article from an electronic source course packet (i.e. whenever it is possible to see the original page numbering), you can just include information about the original source (here, I am using APSA formatting)::

Smith, Ann. 2012. "Democracy's Modern Challenges." Journal of Democracy 23 (Fall): 112-142.

If a reading assignment either does not include the original author's pagination or does not provide a complete citation, you should cite specific page numbers as listed in the reserve assignment, and then note your the material's "compiler." 

Again using APSA formatting as an example:

Smith, Ann. 2010. "Democracy's Modern Challenges." Journal of Democracy 23 (Fall): 112-142. Reserve Reading. Comp. Professor Robert Smith. High Point University, Spring Semester 2012. 

Alternatively, you can cite the material as having coming from an electronic source if your professor provides reading materials in this fashion:

Smith, Ann. 2010. "Democracy's Modern Challenges." Journal of Democracy 23 (Fall): 112-142. <http://www.highpoint.edu/~msetzler/
PolSys/ CPSassignS2010.htm>. Accessed: January 20, 2012.  

If the materials are not numbered in any way or have no date of publication, you should consult a stylebook to determine how to deal with this (this varies by style choice). If you are using APSR formatting (parenthetical citation) and found that the reading assignment listed above did not include page numbers, you would use "Np" in your parenthetical citations of Ann Smith's article (Smith 2010, Np). Similarly, documents without any date are listed "Nd" in APSR formatting.

 

 

 

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