How to Cite Your Sources for your World of 8 Billion Video

December 13, 2022

Citing your sources is essential to any research project, including your World of 8 Billion video! We receive many questions on the best ways to do this. We understand that it can be confusing, especially trying to fit everything in a video that is a minute long, so we wanted to clarify what we are looking for when we ask for your cited sources.

How to Make Your Citation List

While you are researching for your video, you should keep a list of any resource that you use for information, whether that be from the library, Google Scholar, or some other online resource. Our Video Project Organizer has a handy chart in the Research section that serves as a great way to organize your sources! But you can use any method you want, as long as you have a way to keep track of what sources you’re using.

All information presented in the video must be cited, giving credit to the original source. Plagiarism of any kind will result in disqualification.

You do not have to include a list of your citations for your research at the end of your video but if your video is selected as a finalist, we will ask you to submit your citations. Your citation list can be formatted in any formal citation style, MLA, APA, Harvard, etc but must be more than a list of websites. A citation generator might be helpful when creating your citations.

Copyright-free Images and Music

For the contest, we require all images and music to be copyright-free and royalty-free, meaning that you should be able to use them for your video without needing to ask permission but they should be cited as requested by the author. We have a list of 12 Websites for Finding Copyright/Royalty Free Images and Music that can be helpful if you need to find some for your video.

The only reason you would be allowed to use copyrighted materials is if you had a license to use the material. In this case, you must provide written permission for all copyrighted materials.

You may write your own music or use “stock” music that is included in some editing software. If you choose to write your own music, make sure you have the composer sign the Actor Release Form.

Using Creative Commons for Images

You can find Creative Commons photos to use on Google Images by using the filtering tools and selecting “Creative Commons licenses”.

A screenshot of a Google image search, with an arrow pointing to the filter that allows users to select Creative Commons.

You can also search the Creative Commons database for images to use.

If you use photos for your video that fall under a Creative Commons license, please also link those in your citation list, along with the Creative Commons attribution. Add this attribution to the photos in your video to give credit to the author.

The Creative Commons attribution should be listed with the photo, like in the Wikimedia Commons example below:

A screenshot showing an image on Wikimedia Commons.

So if you were using this photo, you would list it in your citation list like this:

“A simple model of Earth using Autodesk Maya” by Kevin Gill is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. You will also want to add this credit line to the photo used in your video.