When writing a research paper you support your thoughts by pointing to other research written on the topic. This shows you have researched your topic, you are aware of the experts in that area, and you know what you are talking about.

You need to cite sources for several reasons:

• To give credit to other researchers for their ideas
• To allow your reader to track down the sources you used
• To avoid plagiarism by quoting words and ideas used by other authors

You can either directly quote what a source has written, or you can reword the idea and paraphrase the text. Either way, you need to acknowledge the source you used with an in-text citation and also as an entry in a reference list.