Design Process (ID 501)

A source is anything that gives you an idea or piece of information to use in your paper or project.

• A source can be a book, magazine, newspaper, letter, song, web page, blog, podcast, interview, email, Facebook update, or even your own class notes.
• A source can also be something visual such as a TV program, movie, photograph, chart, diagram, or illustration.
• A source can even be an artificial intelligence (AI) tool. If you use text generated by a tool like ChatGPT, Bard, or YouChat; an image generated by a tool like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, or Craiyon; or music generated by a tool like Beatoven, cite that tool as your source.

Citing your sources tells your audience where your information came from. This allows them to:

• Go to your sources to learn more about the subject

• Understand how you arrived at your theory, idea or conclusion

• Know which ideas are your own original thoughts

Just as you wouldn’t want someone to steal your design for a chair, you need to give credit where it’s due when you use someone else’s ideas.

Learn more

• Using Research | The Purdue OWL

• Citing Information | University of North Carolina

• What Is Citation? | Plagiarism.org

A citation, or reference, is the information that identifies a source.

Consider this: If someone tells you about a great book and you want to read it, what information will you need to find it? Knowing that the cover is blue won’t be enough. At the very least, you’ll need the title. If it’s a common title, you’ll need the name of the author as well. If your friend is recommending a particular edition of, for example, Janson’s History of Art, you may also need the publisher, the publication year, and the edition number. That’s a citation.

Bibliographic information

The information that identifies a book or any other source is called bibliographic information. The pieces of bibliographic information needed to identify and find a source vary depending on the type of source. Here are some common types of sources and the information needed to identify them:

• Book: author or editor, title, edition, publisher, publication city, and date

• Magazine or journal article: author, article title, magazine title, magazine issue, publication date, and page numbers

• Movie: title, director, main performers, movie studio, and release date

• Photograph, chart, illustration, or other graphic: creator (photographer, painter, etc.) or responsible party (for example: U.S. Geological Survey), the title of the image, and the bibliographic information of the book, magazine or website where you found the image

• Web page: author or responsible party (for example: Design Institute of San Diego), page title, site title, and URL

Why isn’t the URL enough for a web page citation?

Websites change constantly, and URLs change too. If a URL no longer works, your audience can search for the page using the author, page title, and site title.

What if I can’t find a required piece of information?

Sometimes the information truly isn’t there: some articles don’t have authors listed, some product catalogs don’t include a date, and some websites don’t provide much information at all.

First, make sure that you have searched thoroughly for the missing information, and use your common sense. If you can’t find publication information in the front of a book, look in the back. If a web page doesn’t list an author, look for an “About” page. If a website doesn’t list a responsible party or a date when the information was last updated, consider whether you want to rely on a nameless, un-dated source for your information.

If you decide that the source is reliable but you can’t find a piece of bibliographic information, simply leave that element out.

In APA style, only retrievable sources are listed as References. Since a lecture heard in person is not retrievable by anyone else, do not include it in your References; the same is true for personal communications such as interviews and emails.

If you use a quotation or idea from a class lecture, a conversation, an email, or other form personal communication, do cite it using an in-text citation. Here's an example: