APA & Writing

Overview

City University students are responsible for understanding and exercising standards of academic integrity in every aspect of study and in all works submitted. Plagiarism, a violation of academic integrity, is defined as: 

• Presenting another person’s work as your own, including written work, images, designs, or web content. 
• Purchasing a paper, partial papers, or other academic work from a 3rd party and presenting it as your own. 
• Paraphrasing or condensing ideas from another person’s work without proper citation. 
• Failing to document direct quotations with a proper citation. 
• Copying word-for-word, using select phrases from another’s work, or failing to properly cite all sources in which data, examples, ideas, or theories are found. 
• Copying and pasting content and changing a few words or phrases without proper citation. 

Plagiarism is often inadvertent. The information and resources below are intended to help you learn to cite sources correctly and to avoid unintentional plagiarism. 

In the U.S. higher education system, references are used to show your reader where you found your information and/or ideas. Using proper citations allows you to:

• Identify other people’s ideas and information used within your assignment. 
• Give your readers the means to locate and read the sources you cite to better understand your research. 
• Show your instructor that you used academic research within your field to support the concepts learned in class. 

If you take or copy someone else’s words or ideas and present them as if they were your own (without appropriately citing them), you are plagiarizing. 

Anything that isn't your own original analysis--or otherwise common knowledge--must be cited. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Ideas you draw from a source but present entirely in your own words
• Paraphrases and summaries of books, articles, Web sites, videos, etc. 
• Comments made by your instructor in a lecture or meeting
• Direct quotations: single words, short phrases, sentences, and longer passages that have been quoted from books, articles, videos, etc. 
• References to a book or article 
• Statistics, tables, diagrams, and images

If you are unsure if something needs to be cited or not, don't simply guess. Reach out to your instructor or ask a librarian for help.

APA Style

All courses at CityU use APA style. We are currently using the 7th edition. You can find more information on using APA style here:

Warning: Citation Generators or Builders

Citation builders generate APA-formatted references from user-submitted information such as author, date, and publication title. While citation builders are convenient, they are not always accurate. Always check your references and citations for APA errors. 

OWL at Purdue has recently paired with Chegg to provide access to Citation Machine within their tutorials. This guide can help you make decisions about citation generators that you find online: