4 usual citation mistakes that students must avoid

Working on citations can be quite overwhelming for students, which is why they resort to tools like MLA or APA citation generator. But, to prepare the citations and referencing pages accurately, it’s vital to steer clear of the common mistakes that many students make.

Whether you’re using the APA or MLA formatting style, these mistakes can take away the credibility of your academic papers and result in poor grades. Here are a few of these mistakes that you need to be careful about.

Not knowing the difference between citations and references

This can be puzzling even for the most accomplished students. And there’s no easy answer for this. Citations are normally included in the body of the paper with direct quotes or something associated with the author or publication that you got the information from. References are generally presented at the end of the paper, state the eminent writers from essay writing service.

Any citation you add in the main body should also be represented by an entry in the reference list. Even if you use the Harvard, MLA or APA citation generator tools, you have to keep these differences in mind.

The curious case of missing punctuation

When you first start writing down the citations, it can be difficult trying to understand why there is to be a period or a comma in certain places. The punctuation may come across irrelevant to you. But when your professors look at your citations, they’ll immediately notice where you have made mistakes in your formatting.

So, it’s always a wise idea to go through a couple of examples of accurate punctuation in citations before you start writing by yourself.

Not maintaining alphabetical order in citations

Citations need to be properly alphabetized. If there are multiple authors for a particular publication, you must arrange them in alphabetical order.

This rule is applicable for both citations as well as the reference list at the bottom of the paper. This way, it’ll be simpler to find the corresponding information.

Not citing the paraphrased sources

If you’re using someone else’s words and rephrasing them in your style, you still need to provide a citation. This is because you’re using information from another individual's work so that detail still needs to be referenced and cited accordingly.

Citing the paraphrased sources can help you avoid accusations of plagiarism. And that’s the last thing you would want to be accused of for any paper you put together.

Ref: http://joshuadollar.mystrikingly.com/blog/4-usual-citation-mistakes-that-students-must-avoid

Keep these mistakes at bay to submit a well-cited paper.