Now that you know what content you want to use and what you can legally do with a resource, you will need to communicate to your audience where you got your resources and any legal information about these resources. To do this, you will either need to use a citation or an attribution. But what is the difference and why does it matter?
Citations are used in academic writing to communicate to the audience where you got your information or ideas. Proper citation of your resources prevents plagiarism. Citations also allow readers to find the information you use, in case they want to use the information for their own research or fact check your use of the resources. Remember, citations give credit to the original source of information legally protecting you from plagiarism, but they also help to effectively contribute to scholarly communication. This communication is formalized with citations styles such as MLA or APA.
The below video, Integrating Citations into Your Paper, will help you determine when and how to use citations.
Attributions are used exclusively with openly licensed content. Remember that all CC licenses require you to give credit to the original creator. This is the BY in a CC license. An attribution is how credit is communicated to a reader. Attributions are a legal requirement of a CC license. In other words, the requirement of an attribution is written into the legal code of a CC license. Attributions are not formalized stylistically like citations. However, a clear and effective attribution will lead a reader back to the original work, just like a proper citation.
An attribution should always give credit to the creator. These elements should be included in a well written attribution:
You can remember this as TASL.
Here is an example of an attribution for this page of the resource guide:
Citations and Attributions © 2021 by Rachel Arteaga is licensed under CC BY 4.0 
As you can see, all elements from TASL are incorporated in this attribution. You might notice the copyright symbol. This symbol is included because a Creative Commons license is a copyright license. The license simply states how the copyright owner will allow a work to be used. So in this case, anyone can use this work however they want, so long as credit is given to the creator.
If you would like an easy method of generating an attribution, try using the Creative Commons License Chooser or the Open Washington Attribution Builder.
If you would like more information on citations, including format, you can consult the following resources:
Unless other wise noted, all content on this page is license with the following license: Citations and Attributions © 2021 by Rachel Arteaga is licensed under CC BY 4.0
