When you use a book, article, or Internet source to help you write a paper, you must give credit to the author who wrote
the original source.

First, take a look at this lesson on paraphrasing, summarizing, and plagiarism to understand the general principles and reasons why this is important in  American  classroom culture.

If you are going to use another author's ideas, you can paraphrase (use their general ideas) or quote them directly and use quotation marks. You can refer to this example summary to see how to refer to an author and title within your paper.

Your teacher may require you to put a list of sources at the end of your paper.
You can look at this website for rules on how to do this:

http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/wts/citing.html

This website gives very specific rules for citing sources.  For now, you will probably only need general rules for citing a book, a newspaper or magazine article, or a website.  Below are some examples of these:
 

Books:

Newpaper Articles:

Magazine Articles:

Internet:

 
  Here is a website about citing Internet sources:
You can look at this website for rules on how to do this:

http://www.indiana.edu/~libugls/Publications/electronic_mla.html