Handbooks for different citation styles are available at the Information Desk on the 1st floor of Reese Library.
Most of what college students hear about documentation is couched in terms of plagiarism avoidance. Why is such a big deal made out of this? From high school on, students are told NOT to plagiarize. A more fruitful approach may be to ask "Why do we document?" Here's why.
When any kind of research is undertaken, the process begins with a careful, often critical and analytical, review of the work that has already been done that is relevant to the project at hand. Some of this earlier work will be incorporated into the current project, to support the researcher's basic approach and theories; some of it may be refuted by the research being done; all of it is important to understanding how the researcher's work fits into the field in which they are working.
Documentation is the careful way in which the researcher tells her/his readers which of these works he/she is using, and to what purpose. Without documentation, subsequent researchers will waste valuable time replicating work that has already been done, but not documented for others to find.
Whenever you're doing research, you should always document your work. First of all, you want to satisfy your assignment, and the research paper assignments are all going to require some kind of search for sources of information to support your research question. Make your professor happy, and get full credit, all at the same time. Second, when doing work for a grade, you need to be sure to give the person grading your work something to assess. Your careful analysis of works that you have found on your own are among the things that your professors are looking for when they grade your research assignments.
Many of the GALILEO databases include citation helper utilities. Similar tools are available free on the Internet. NO citation helper or documentation management tools -- even the expensive ones -- are 100% accurate. Use them as short-cuts, not as the last word. Always use the manual, or a guide to the manual, required for your assignment to verify that your details are correct.
If you're not familiar with the academic honesty policy at Augusta University, be sure you read it. The policy is located in the Academic Regulations section of the 2015-2016 Augusta University Course Catalog. It's also available in your Jaguar Handbook.
For additional information and guidance on good documentation practices, the following sites may be useful:
If you need help managing your citations, check out Zotero. Zotero is a free plug-in for Mozilla Firefox which allows you to capture citations from databases and websites and allows you to easily format them for your bibliography.
