WR 121: Written Reasoning as Discovery and Inquiry

Organizing your research can help make the writing and citing process easier. Use tips from this page to guide you in this step.

Why do we cite? Several reasons! 

1. It makes us look good. Seriously, it's ethical and responsible to help readers differentiate our ideas from those we are using from others.
2. It helps us point our readers to our sources where they can more deeply engage with the scholarly conversation.
3. It helps us to learn how to communicate formally within our discipline/major.

Check out this video from Kevin deLaplante to learn about plagiarism and borrowing both quotes and ideas (paraphrasing).

Long description of "Organizing your research" for web accessibility

Official Style Manuals

There are many different types of academic and professional writing styles. The four guidebooks below represent some of the major ones. Use these guides to learn how professional researchers and writers prepare their manuscripts for publication or sharing.

Online Style Resources

Although these resources are not official, they are still credible and very useful! If one of these websites doesn't answer your question, check out the official style guide or contact a librarian for help!

UO Research Guides

These helpful guided from UO Libraries provide information on various citation styles.

Pause to Reflect

First of all, congratulations on making it this far! You may still have some loose ends to tie up, and that is OK. Take a moment to think back through your research process. Did you learn any helpful tips along the way? Are there new strategies that you can use for future projects or papers?

Do you still need more information? You can go back to previous steps at any time to revisit your research question or look for more or different sources of information.

If you think you missed something, please feel free to reach out to a Subject Librarian: