Citation Guide: Home

Academic scholarship is built on presenting factual information. Facts help distinguish between what is "opinion" and what is "credible." Your professors will often require you to present an essay with citations that will anchor your burgeoning academic work.

Citations will allow you to:

• Demonstrate a trail of evidence that supports your thesis/claim/argument.
• Show your professor how to find the evidence quickly and efficiently.
• Protect intellectual property rights.

When should you cite?:

• Direct Quotations: When you use the author’s exact words
• Paraphrasing: When you summarize someone else’s words or ideas
• Facts: When you mention something that is not common knowledge
• Images: When you use pictures, charts, and graphics that someone else created in a presentation 

Adapted from City College of San Francisco "Citing Sources" Libguide

Academic Honesty

In academically honest writing or speaking, you must document sources of information whenever:

• another person's exact words are quoted.
• another person's idea, opinion, or theory is used through paraphrase.
• facts, statistics, or other illustrative materials are borrowed.

In order to complete academically honest work, you need to: 

• acknowledge all sources according to the method of citation preferred by the instructor.
• write as much as possible from their own understanding of the materials and in their own voice.

NoodleTools is an online citation generator paid for by Napa Valley College, which means it is free for all NVC students and faculty!

While there are many functions of NoodleTools, three features that might be of most interest are:

1. citation generator (MLA 8th ed., APA 6th ed., Chicago/Turabian 17th ed.)
2. notecards for taking notes on cited sources
3. sharing of working bibliographies with classmates or instructors.​

Hint: When setting up a new project in NoodleTools, be sure to select the Advanced citation level (even if you're new!) so you have the most citation options available to you.