Using and Integrating Sources and Proper Citation In order to use a source properly and avoid plagiarism, you must perform three different stages of integration.

Stage One. Attribution At the point where you first begin to use another author’s ideas (whether through quotation or paraphrasing), you must attribute those ideas directly to the author. For example: In Comic Book Nation, Bradford Wright suggests,…

Stage Two. Citation After you have introduced the author's ideas with an attribution, you must tell the reader where you found those ideas. To do this, you must provide a page number citation. This is called parenthetical documentation.

Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns has been called the most important superhero comic since the first issue of Superman. Miller’s comic is certainly one of the most important comics of the mid-1980s deconstruction of the superhero. Bradford Wright claims, “once confident symbols of hope, superheroes now spoke to the paranoia and psychosis lurking behind the rosy veneer of Reagan’s America” (266). Miller’s Dark Knight serves as one of the first and most influential examples of this trend.

Stage Three. Bibliography The bibliography completes the process of telling your reader where you found your information. This happens at the end of your paper and is called (under the MLA format, which we are using) the "works cited" page. For each author whom you discuss in your paper, you must provide a bibliographic citation. If you have multiple authors, you should list them in alphabetical order.

Works Cited Brown, Jeffrey A. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.