With so much focus on plagiarism and with the advent of online paper mills, you may feel reluctant to share or discuss your work with anyone else. That would be a very unfortunate result, however, since much of our knowledge comes from talking with and learning from others. Indeed, many college projects now require some form of collaboration or teamwork, whether it involves commenting on someone else’s draft, preparing a group presentation of research findings, or composing a text with many others on a wiki or on Google Drive.

Collaborative writing projects call for the same kind of acknowledgments you use in a paper or other project you prepare by yourself. In general, cite all sources used by the group, and acknowledge all assistance provided by others. In some cases, you may decide to do this in an endnote rather than in your bibliography or list of works cited.