If your professor has given specific instructions about the citation style you should use or how citations should be formatted for their assignments, always follow those instructions.
Through research, you will gather information that supports your ideas, found in sources created by others. A citation identifies these sources and gives your reader the information needed to locate them. It gives credit to the authors whose ideas you are using.
Citing sources is important because:
If you don't credit the authors of your sources by citing them in your paper, you are committing plagiarism, which is not acceptable at Northampton Community College and can result in a penalty against your work or other serious consequences.
You need to cite:
You don’t need to cite your own opinions and insight, and you don’t need to cite facts that are common knowledge (information repeated in multiple sources that is widely known or accepted as a fact).
When in doubt, it's best to cite.
Citation Handouts from the NCC Libraries and Learning Centers
Other resources
No online citation tool or software is perfect. They could give you the citation in a different style than the one you need. They could find the wrong publication information for the source you are using. If you enter incorrect information or do not include some information, then the citation they create will be incorrect and might be missing information too.
Some sources provide their own citation. The library's databases may also provide citations for sources you find in them. These should only be used as a starting point, as they may not be entirely accurate, either. They often include too much information or are formatted incorrectly (they might be missing punctuation, hanging indents, italicization, or double-spacing).
It is your responsibility to check the accuracy of your citations and make corrections before submitting research papers or other class assignments.