Sources don’t always have to be formal academic articles or books. One of the trickiest aspects of citing your sources and documenting your work is recognizing what should be cited, regardless of the type of composition you are crafting.
You should generally cite a source in these cases:
when you use or refer to somebody else’s words or ideas from a magazine, book, newspaper, song, TV program, movie, Web page, computer program, letter, advertisement, or any other medium
when you use information obtained through interviewing another person
when you use data from experiments that you did not conduct
when you use diagrams, illustrations, charts, or photos that you did not create
when you use audio or video clips that you did not create
If you do not, you risk committing plagiarism, a serious academic offense.
Typically, you do not need to document a source in these cases:
when you are writing from your own experiences, your own observations, your own insights, your own thoughts, or your own conclusions about a subject
when you are using “common knowledge”—folklore, commonsense observations, or shared information within your field of study or cultural group
when you are compiling generally accepted facts
when you are writing up your own experimental result
Related topics:
Understanding why documenting sources is important
Integrating sources in a multimodal composition
Documenting sources in a multimodal composition
Citing sources and avoiding plagiarism in MLA, APA, Chicago styles