Skip to Main Content

Electronic Resources (articles, databases, ebooks, ejournals, streaming videos) Guide

Provides guidelines on how to search for articles, databases, e-journals, e-books, and streaming videos.

Guides:

The most commonly used style manuals are APA (American Psychological Association), which is usually used in the social sciences, MLA (Modern Language Association), which is used in the humanities, and Chicago Manual of Style, which is used primarily in History.

Rosenthal Library has copies of MLA Bibliography, Chicago Manual of Style and APA Style Manual in our Reference and Reserve collections.

Here are online guides to three of the most popular citation styles:

Plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's writing as if it were one's own. To avoid plagiarism, you must provide full citations for all types of sources, including, books, articles, government documents, interviews, Internet sources, and media.

Remember that accidental plagiarism is still plagiarism! Knowing the standards of CUNY's Academic Integrity Policy can help you use sources in an academically acceptable way.

Strategies for avoiding plagiarism:

  • Write down the citation information and page numbers for every source you use, so that you can easily find it again later.
  • Take notes as you are reading to remind yourself what information came from each source.
  • Instead of copying and pasting, put the original source aside and write down the main ideas in your own words. This is one method of paraphrasing — using someone else's ideas but putting them in your own words. Note that you will still need to cite the source of these ideas.
  • It is a good idea to quote directly from sources, but you must make sure that you put any words that are not your own into quotations and cite their source.