Where Should You Place Citations?

Citation is used to give credits to authors and sources from which information is borrowed from. There are times when you incorporate the ideas of other people into your papers and when you do this, you should put citations to indicate that you have only borrowed that information. Otherwise, you can get penalized for committing plagiarism and receive serious punishments for doing so. To prevent this from happening you should use citations. This article will teach you how.

Citation at the Start of a Sentence

A citation can be put at the beginning of a sentence either in the form of an open citation or a semi-open citation. In doing so, you should include the name of the author or source as well as the year when the written piece was published. An example of an open citation is:

In 2015, scientist Kit Anderson said that the world economy would fluctuate more and more as various countries around the world experience economic crashes and recession while other countries experience an upward surge in their economic status.

On the other hand, if you want to include a semi-open citation, then it will be similar to this:

According to Kit Anderson (2015), the world economy will experience continuous fluctuations due to the differing economic status of various countries around the world wherein some countries experience recession while others experience an improvement in their economies.

At the End of the Sentence

There are times when it can be difficult to use an open or semi-open citation to give credits to your source. Thus, an alternative for you will be to include the citation at the end of the sentence which includes the borrowed information. A citation at the end of a sentence is usually called a closed citation. It can be done by enclosing the name of the author or source as well as the year when the written piece was published in parentheses. An example would be:

The world economy will experience continuous fluctuations due to the differing economic status of various countries around the world wherein some countries experience recession while others experience an improvement in their economies (Kit Anderson, 2015).

Keeping the details discussed above in mind, you will be able to incorporate citations in your papers and other written works to be able to give credits to your sources and avoid committing plagiarism. With a lot of content nowadays, it may be difficult to know if you are accidentally committing plagiarism. To check, you can use the tool called Plagiarism Checker tool. It can give accurate results when it comes to checking if some contents of your paper has plagiarised on the web.