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MCOM 320: DRAFT

This guide was created to support MCOM 320 a required business writing course. Questions? Contact Leticia Camacho, Business Librarian

RefWorks

Once you find articles to use in your research paper, citing the source of the work you quote, paraphrase, or summarize is important. There are three main reasons:  1) To give credit to the people who created the original work, 2)To tell people how to find the original source, 3) To comply with copyright law, 4) Documenting - Citing Resources

Chicago Citation Style

CHICAGO Citation Sytle  - Used with all subjects by books, magazines, newspapers, and other non-scholarly publications. 

APA Citation Style

APA Citation Style  - Used in Psychology, Education, and other Social Sciences including Business.  The Harold B. Lee Library doesn't subscribe to the online manual. The following websites contain samples of citations and in-text citations.

Citing AI Tools

Excerpt taken from the Chicago Manual of Style.

"You need to credit ChatGPT and similar tools whenever you use the text they generate in your work. But for most types of writing, you can acknowledge the AI tool in your text (e.g., “The following recipe for pizza dough was generated by ChatGPT”).

If you need a more formal citation—for example, for a student paper or a research article—a numbered footnote or endnote might look like this:

1. Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, March 7, 2023, https://chat.openai.com/chat.

ChatGPT stands in as the “author” of the content, and OpenAI (the company that developed ChatGPT) is the publisher or sponsor, followed by the date the text was generated. After that, the URL tells us where the ChatGPT tool may be found, but because readers can’t necessarily get to the cited content (see below), that URL isn’t an essential element of the citation.

If the prompt hasn’t been included in the text, it can be included in the note:

1. ChatGPT, response to “Explain how to make pizza dough from common household ingredients,” OpenAI, March 7, 2023.

If you’ve edited the AI-generated text, you should say so in the text or at the end of the note (e.g., “edited for style and content”). But you don’t need to say, for example, that you’ve applied smart quotes or adjusted the font; changes like those can be imposed silently (see CMOS 13.7 and 13.8).

If you’re using author-date instead of notes, any information not in the text would be placed in a parenthetical text reference. For example, “(ChatGPT, March 7, 2023).”

But don’t cite ChatGPT in a bibliography or reference list unless you provide a publicly available link (e.g., via a browser extension like ShareGPT or A.I. Archives). Though OpenAI assigns unique URLs to conversations generated from your prompts, those can’t be used by others to access the same content (they require your login credentials), making a ChatGPT conversation like an email, phone, or text conversation—or any other type of personal communication (see CMOS 14.214 and 15.53)."

DOIs vs Permalinks

While citation styles can vary greatly in their particulars, most major styles (including APA, MLA, and Chicago) require writers to include either a URL or a DOI in citations for digital content whenever possible. You do not normally need to include both. The Purdue Online Writing lab explains the difference between URLs and DOIs and briefly describes how to incorporate either form of information into your citations.

Basic Guidelines for Chicago Citation Style

  • Provide DOIs over URLs whenever possible.
  • If no DOI is available, use the source’s URL in the citation.

  • If using a DOI, omit the URL, access date, and publication date from Reference List entry. Instead, add the DOI preceded by a "doi:" label (note the lowercase). 

  • Generic Journal Citation: 
    Lastname, First/middle initials. “Title of Article.” Journal Title volume number, issue no. (Year): page range. https://www.someaddress.com/full/url/ or doi:0000000/000000000000

Avoid Plagiarism

(Taken from your Textbook, Writing & Speaking for Business)

Plagiarism is the attempt to pass off the ideas, research, theories, or words of others as one's own. Examples of plagiarism include:

Direct Plagiarism: The verbatim copying of an original source without acknowledging the source.

Paraphrased Plagiarism: The paraphrasing, without acknowledgment, of ideas from another that the reader might mistake for your own.

Plagiarism Mosaic: The borrowing of words, ideas, or data from an original source and blending this original material with one's own without acknowledging the source.

Insufficient Acknowledgment: The partial or incomplete attribution of words, ideas, or data from an original source.

Plagiarism may occur with respect to unpublished as well as published material. Acts of copying another student's work and submitting it as one's own individual work without proper attribution is a serious form of plagiarism.

"When in Doubt, Give Credit!" (Baker, 2007) 

This is a serious academic offense. Review BYU's position on Plagiarism.

Your MCOM 320 professors use a program called "Turnitin", a worldwide standard in online plagiarism prevention. It allows instructors to digitally assess their students’ work to ensure that plagiarism is not taking place in the classroom.