Students are expected to give proper credit to those individuals whose materials and intellectual properties are used within a paper. Do not plagiarize. Give credit where credit is due for three reasons: (1) plagiarism is illegal and is grounds for expulsion, (2) documentation adds to a writer's credibility, and (3) documentation allows the reader to check and/or obtain additional information on the topic from the sources. The format for documentation at Colorado Technical University follows A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th ed., by Kate L. Turabian. The Turabian manual can be found in the Resource Center and can be purchased at the Colorado Technical University Bookstore. A brief introduction to the Turabian documentation format is provided here, and the specific section referenced in Turabian is indicated in parentheses.

The Author-Date System

The Turabian citation guidelines allow for many formats of documentation; however, the required format for documentation at Colorado Technical University is the author-date system, which is based upon The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. (see 10.1). The author-date system uses parenthetical references (PR) within the text of the paper and a reference list (RL) within the Works Cited list.

Note: If a writer feels the need to use a footnote to provide extra information (i.e., a definition or an explanation), then it is better to include the information in the text. Either the information is important enough to appear in the text or the information is not important enough to appear in the text. If the information is not important enough to appear in the text, then it is better to leave the information out of the paper entirely. In a paper using parenthetical references (PR), information that might appear in a note should be placed in parentheses in the text so the reader does not have to consult two parts of the back matter to find a source (see 3.98 and 8.4):

Auditors traced this error to the member banks and their contributors (see appendix 3).