Literature Review - what is a Literature Review, why it is important and how it is done

Plagiarism is "the deliberate or reckless representation of another’s words, thoughts, or ideas as one’s own without attribution in connection with submission of academic work, whether graded or otherwise" (University of North Carolina 2009).
The best way to avoid plagiarizing on your paper is to cite your sources using one of the many citations style used in academia.

"Write it Right" are the official referencing guidelines for the Institute approved by Academic Council in 2011 and authored by senior members of library staff and involving the LIT Quality Office. Write it Right provides guidance and support in an area that can often prove daunting for learners.

• OWL Purdue: Research and Citation Resources Excellent site that explain in detail how, when and why to use this citation style for both print and online sources, with an emphasis to the major citation styles, APA, MLA and Chicago.

Why Cite?

There are four main reasons:

• To acknowledge the author(s) of the work that you used to write your paper.
• To provide context to your research and demonstrate that your paper is well-researched.
• To allow readers to find the original source and learn more about some aspect that you mentioned only briefly in the document.
• To enable further research by letting others discover what has already been explored and written about on a given topic.

What and When to Cite?

You should always cite other people's words, ideas and other intellectual property that you use in your papers or that influence your ideas. This includes but isn't limited to books, journal articles, web pages, reports, data, statistics, speeches, lectures, personal interviews, etc. You should cite whenever you:

• use a direct quote
• paraphrase
• summarize
• use facts or statistics that are relatively less known or relate directly to your argument.

With some many sources available only online, it is important to find the right link to use in your citations' bibliography/reference list/worked cited.

A stable link is a web address that will consistently point to a specific information source such as an ebook, an article, a record in the catalog, a video, or a database. A stable link may also be called a permalink, document URL, persistent URL, or durable URL depending on the resource. You may also use a DOI (digital object identifier) found in many databases.

When citing online references your citation should look something like this:

Rivera Villegas, Carmen M. "La loca de la casa" de Marta Aponte Alsina: Reinvenciones romanticas de un canon fundacional.” Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, p. 62, www.jstor.org/stable/27923253. Accessed 20 May 2009.

or

Rivera Villegas, Carmen M. "La loca de la casa" de Marta Aponte Alsina: Reinvenciones romanticas de un canon fundacional.” Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, p. 62, JSTOR, doi:10.1353/mfs.1997.0056.