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Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide — Citation Resources

This guide will help you understand what is a Literature Review, why it is important and how it is done.

Plagarism - What is it and how to avoid it

From UConn’s Community Standards: “Academic misconduct is dishonest or unethical academic behavior that includes, but is not limited, to misrepresenting mastery in an academic area (e.g., cheating), failing to properly credit information, research or ideas to their rightful originators or representing such information, research or ideas as your own (e.g., plagiarism).” — University of Connecticut, Community Standards, Appendix A

If you are caught plagiarizing on your research paper, sanctions range from a verbal/written warning, being placed on academic probation, and being suspended or expeled from the university.

 

The best way to avoid plagiarizing on your paper is to cite your sources using one of the many citations style used in academia. The Citation Guides and Management Tools Guide is your one stop shop to learn more about the most commonly used citation styles.

Purpose of Citations, When and What to Cite?

Why Cite?

There are four main reasons:

  • To acknowledge the author(s) of the work that you used to write your paper.
  • To provide context to your research and demonstrate that your paper is well-researched.
  • To allow readers to find the original source and learn more about some aspect that you mentioned only briefly in the document.
  • To enable further research by letting others discover what has already been explored and written about on a given topic.

What and When to Cite?

You should always cite other people's words, ideas and other intellectual property that you use in your papers or that influence your ideas. This includes but isn't limited to books, journal articles, web pages, reports, data, statistics, speeches, lectures, personal interviews, etc. You should cite whenever you:

  • use a direct quote
  • paraphrase
  • summarize
  • use facts or statistics that are relatively less known or relate directly to your argument.

Stable Links

With some many sources available only online, it is important to find the right link to use in your citations' bibliography/reference list/worked cited.

 

A stable link is a web address that will consistently point to a specific information source such as an ebook, an article, a record in the catalog, a video, or a database. A stable link may also be called a permalink, document URL, persistent URL, or durable URL depending on the resource. You may also use a DOI (digital object identifier) found in many databases.

When citing online references your citation should look something like this:

Rivera Villegas, Carmen M. "La loca de la casa" de Marta Aponte Alsina: Reinvenciones romanticas de un canon fundacional.” Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, p. 62, www.jstor.org/stable/27923253. Accessed 20 May 2009.

or

Rivera Villegas, Carmen M. "La loca de la casa" de Marta Aponte Alsina: Reinvenciones romanticas de un canon fundacional.” Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, p. 62, JSTOR, doi:10.1353/mfs.1997.0056.

If your permalink contains https://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url= (as in many EBSCO databases) you will need to remove the entire prefix from your citation. Just keep the URL that follow the equal sign (=) for the citation.

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