Research Guides

Writing and Citing

Avoiding Plagairism

What is Plagiarism?
  • To steal and pass off the ideas, words or creation of someone else as your own. 
  • To use someone's work or creation without crediting the source.
 
Why is Avoiding Plagiarism Important?
 
Giving credit where it is due
  • Sharing and using ideas is part of the academic process, but it is important to clearly distinguish between your own ideas & other people's ideas.
Maintaining academic integrity
  • Using other people's work without permission or acknowledgement is considered cheating. 
  • For academic writing to be credible, you must be honest about the direct and indirect inspirations for your thoughts and ideas.
Providing evidence for your ideas
  • Properly using other people's work to back up your own thoughts & ideas provides evidence for your research and allows others to build on your work.

What is a Citation Manager?

A citation manager is a software tool that helps you organize and manage your research sources, including journal articles, books, and other references. Citation managers can help you:
  • Collect: Import files and organize them into a personal library
  • Organize: Create an organization system, attach PDFs, and add notes to references
  • Cite: Create citations from your library as you write, and insert them directly into your documents
  • Share: Collaborate with others on manuscript writing, and share your resources with others 
Citation managers are especially useful when writing long papers that require the use of many sources, like dissertations or capstone papers. They can also help you save time by allowing you to easily switch between citation styles and generate a formatted bibliography at the end of your document.

Citation Management Guides

For more information on how to use citation management software see the guides below:

The Writing Center

The Writing Center can assist you with various writing projects. For more information or to schedule an appointment, click on the link below:

Why We Cite

How We Cite

Citation Management Tools

EndNote

A downloadable bibliography and database manager that enables you to collect citation information from databases, websites, and more; organize them; and use them to create bibliographies and in-text citations. The link provided will take you to the University of Miami Information Technology website where you can download EndNote.

RefWorks

Note: To access, users must create/log into an individual account. Refworks is a web based bibliography and database manager that allows users to create their own personal database by importing references from text files or online databases.

Zotero
Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources.