Module 2: Citations, Acknowledgements, & Ownership
Welcome to Module 2 of this learning series!
As a graduate student in Virginia Tech’s School of Education, you will be writing papers, reports, and articles that combine your own writing with writing and ideas from other sources.
In your scholarly writing, you will use “APA style,” a specific set of guidelines and formatting rules established by the American Psychological Association. APA style addresses various aspects of academic writing, including formatting, in-text citations, reference lists, and the overall structure of papers.
This module will explore the importance of using citations correctly in your scholarly writing and provide essential insights into APA’s various citation rules. This module will also address the issue of authorship and research ownership, which recognize individuals’ intellectual contributions to a piece of work and facilitates transparent communication in scholarly communities.
After completing this module, you should be able to:
- Explain why citations are important in scholarly work.
- Identify when citations are required.
- Apply proper formatting to citations and reference lists in your writing.
- Demonstrate proper acknowledgement of intellectual contributions and property.
- Apply those rules to your own scholarly efforts.
- Explain when an authorship agreement should be used.
- Differentiate between authorship and contribution.
Citations
Documenting sources (others’ ideas, writing, and other intellectual property) through citations and reference lists is fundamental to scholarly integrity and credibility, and critical to the work in which you will engage as a graduate student. Most importantly, it gives proper credit to those whose original ideas or writing were used and helps the readers of your work to locate and access the original work for themselves.
The Constitution of the Virginia Tech Graduate Honor System states that “immediately following every piece of quoted or paraphrased material, some type of reference is required” (Virginia Tech Graduate School, 2025, p. 21).
When you include the exact wording (i.e., quote) of another person, you must indicate this clearly in your work. The quoted words must be surrounded by quotation marks and followed by an in-text citation including the author name(s), date of publication, and page number(s).
Examples of a proper quote citation
“Overall, non-multitasking students outperformed multitasking students almost two-to-one, and there was no significant correlation between students’ technology-based multitasking self-efficacy and their technology-based multitasking performance” (Doolittle et al., 2024, p. 41).
“Overall, non-multitasking students outperformed multitasking students . . . and there was no significant correlation between students’ technology-based multitasking self-efficacy and their technology-based multitasking performance” (Doolittle et al., 2024, p. 41).
Research has shown “no significant correlation between students’ technology-based multitasking self-efficacy and their technology-based multitasking performance” (Doolittle et al., 2024, p. 41).
In each of these three examples, the words are an exact, word-for-word quote from the 2024 article. As such, they are properly enclosed in quotation marks because they are the words and intellectual property of the article’s authors.
When you paraphrase another author’s work into your own words, you must use an in-text citation with author name(s) and date of publication.
Example of a proper paraphrase citation
Research has shown that even when students have high self-efficacy for multitasking with technology while attending classes, they are not actually as academically successful as when they don’t multitask (Doolittle et al., 2024).
These words are a paraphrase, or summary, of the authors’ statement while not using their words directly. The idea came from the authors, so paraphrasing the statement and including the in-text citation is appropriate.
Every citation you make in your work must correspond to entries in a reference list (similar to a bibliography or works cited). The reference list is designed to share with the readers of your work all of the sources whose text, images, ideas, and other content you included in your own work. Every source included in the reference list must be cited at least once in your paper.
Citation Resources
APA style provides clear guidelines and examples of how quotations and paraphrasing from all manner of others’ work (like books, articles, websites, and more) should be cited in your writing. Different conventions are used based on numerous variables including, for example, the type of source, the number of authors, and whether the source is dated.
Virginia Tech APA Resources
Virginia Tech Libraries offers APA resources online, including:
Purdue OWL APA Resources
Purdue University’s OWL (On-campus Writing Lab) has an updated, extensive guide focused on:
- General guidelines
- In-text citations
- Reference lists
AI & Citations
In scholarly work, specific guidelines apply to citations of AI sources.
Virginia Tech’s Office of Undergraduate Academic Integrity clearly states that when students use AI in their academic work, they must properly acknowledge and disclose when and how AI tools were used, with proper citations.
The American Psychological Association (APA) maintains an APA Generative AI Reference website. Some of its guidance includes how to site AI tools in your work:
When using the chat function of an AI tool (such as Microsoft Copilot), use the tool’s sharing option to provide a unique URL and title for the chat.
Format:
AI Company Name. (Year, Month Day). Title of chat [Description]. Tool Name/Model. Chat URL
Example – Reference List:
Microsoft. (2026, January 15). Top 10 topics for AI literacy in undergrad [Generative AI chat]. Copilot. https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/QMrPmoWVLynCzRkh7XzWa
Example – Citation:
(Microsoft, 2026)
When it would be unhelpful or unethical to cite a specific AI chat, or when you want to broadly identify the existence of the AI tool, cite only the general AI tool.
Format:
AI Company Name. (Year). Tool Name/Model [Description]. Tool URL
Example – Reference List:
Microsoft. (2026). Copilot [Large language model]. https://copilot.microsoft.com/
Example – Citation:
(Microsoft, 2026)
“Researchers should document the prompts used with AI tools for their own records. To the extent that it helps readers, these prompts can be included where the AI use is disclosed, or elsewhere as appropriate, such as in an appendix or supplemental material” (APA, 2025).
Example:
I provided the following prompt to Copilot (Microsoft, 2026): ‘List up to 10 most important topics for undergraduate students learning AI literacy.’ After reviewing the initial suggestions created, I refined the list by adding more detail, specifying the student age range should be between 18 and 30.
Research Ownership & Authorship
Throughout your graduate school career and beyond, you will likely collaborate with peers, faculty, or other members of the academic community in creating scholarly work. It’s important to understand the conventions for the division of responsibility and recognition for that work.
Authorship is the idea that any person who contributed significant work toward the publication of scholarly research should be listed as an author of that work. It can be a difficult topic to navigate as a graduate student, but it’s significant and important to get right. Disputes can lead to conflict about who has the right to claim ownership of the material: essentially, an intellectual rights tug-of-war.
An authorship agreement, which is a document signed by all collaborators that explains the roles of each member, can help you to avoid authorship disputes. It is a good idea to create one for any collaborative project that might result in publication.
Guidance
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) Code of Ethics identifies the following relative to authorship credit:
- “Education researchers ensure that all who have made a substantive contribution to an intellectual product are listed as authors” (AERA, 2011, p. 153).
- “Education researchers take responsibility and credit, including authorship credit, only for work they have actually performed or to which they have contributed” (AERA, 2011, p. 154).
- “Education researchers ensure that principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits are based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. Education researchers specify the criteria for making these determinations at the outset of the writing process” (AERA, 2011, p. 154).
- “A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis” (AERA, 2011, p. 154).
Student Considerations
- Authorship issues also relate to products of coursework and a student’s thesis or dissertation.
- It may be scary to stand up for your rights in collaborative research with faculty for fear that it could negatively impact your relationship with that faculty member. But it’s your right as a student to have your work acknowledged by way of authorship.
Faculty Considerations
It’s generally agreed that in the case of collaborations between students and faculty members, it’s the responsibility of the faculty member to initiate the discussion about authorship at the onset of the project.
Ready for the next module?
References
American Educational Research Association (AERA). (2011, February). Code of Ethics. https://www.aera.net/Portals/38/docs/About_AERA/CodeOfEthics(1).pdf
American Psychological Association (APA). (2025, December). Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 1—Reference formats.https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/cite-generative-ai-references
Doolittle, P., Wojdak, K., Watson, C. E., Adam, D., & Mariano, G. (2024). Technology-focused multitasking self-efficacy and performance: Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you can’t.The Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,24(2).
Virginia Tech Graduate School. (2025, August). Constitution of the Graduate Honor System. https://graduateschool.vt.edu/content/dam/graduateschool_vt_edu/graduate-honor-system/Constitution2025.pdf