Academic Honesty and Citing Sources
Watch this video to see how to get citations for your sources from our databases.
Welcome to this New York Film Academy library video tutorial. In this video we’re going to be talking about the topics of academic integrity and also finding citations in library resources for your academic papers.
So, if you’re a student at NYFA, you’ve certainly seen something to this effect on pretty much every syllabi that you’ve received. Basically stating that plagiarism is unacceptable when writing papers and turning in assignments and that academic integrity must be maintained at all times. It’s a fairly serious matter, one that if you are found in breach of, there is some rather severe disciplinary actions that could occur to you. So, the big thing that we want to highlight here from the library’s perspective is that when it comes time to do research, when it comes time to write papers especially, we highly, highly recommend reaching out to the NYFA Writing Center for assistance. They have their own website here, nyfawritingcenter.com. You can schedule appointments with tutors to help you with this. We absolutely recommend taking advantage of this service. Also, on their website you can click under services and they have an MLA & Academic Honesty lecture that you can actually look at directly. It’s just a PDF document that you can refer back to while writing your paper. We highly recommend utilizing this as you move forward with your academic career.
Now, when it comes time to actually generate citations for your Works Cited page, fortunately enough the resources that we offer through the library, the databases that we have access to actually make this quite easy on you. So, first let's look at EBSCO. You can see here I have a journal article pulled up. The Art of Anime. And, let’s say, you know, I find something in here that I want to use as evidence in a paper I’m writing. I, of course, will put my in-line citation, my in-text citation, but when it comes time to generate the citation in your Works Cited page, you just need to click the link, there’s a toolbar over here and one of the options is Cite. Click the Cite option and you’ll see it opens up a list of different styles of citations. Pretty much everything you write at NYFA will use the MLA citation format, so you just need to scroll down to MLA, highlight the MLA option, and you can just copy and paste this over to your paper.
Now, JSTOR actually makes this quite a bit easier, even. You can see here I’m looking at a, it’s actually a book chapter on the film Tombstone. Or, imaginations of Tombstone in popular works. The Cite option is right here upfront. And MLA format is the very first one that comes up. So again, you can highlight it, copy and paste, or you can just click the Copy button and then paste it into your Works Cited page.
And finally, Alexander Street, which is our screenplay database. I currently have the Back to the Future script pulled up as an example. So, let's say I need to cite this because I’ve used it as evidence in a paper. Again, the Cite option is right here at the top. If I click that it’s going to redirect me over to a new page. I just need to select MLA7 format, highlight it, and copy/paste. Pretty straightforward.
Now, you’ve probably heard us mention, though, in the library and possibly in other videos on the site that these citations are not perfect, and that’s true. They are generally pretty good, they’re going to get you most of the way there in terms of formatting, but we highly highly highly recommend that you double check the formatting before submitting your paper. You can, of course, use your MLA style guide. If you don’t have one of those we do have copies available at the library for you to check out. And, of course, there’s also the Purdue OWL website. Purdue University has this extensive writing and style guide available to anybody for free online. The MLA formatting guide is actually quite good. They even have the option of generating citations through their site directly. So, I definitely recommend utilizing this. And then, of course, also make an appointment with the Writing Center to double check before you turn in your paper. Citation formatting is something that you will be graded on when you submit papers, so best to make absolutely certain that things are formatted correctly so as to not lose points on an assignment that would be easily gained.
So, anyway, if you have any further questions about finding citations in our library resources, do feel free to reach out to library staff, and we will talk to you next time.