CMI article citations and fair use

Creation Ministries International has been a trusted resource for creation information for over 40 years, and we create the information to be shared. A general rule is that you may share our resources for non-profit, educational usage, provided that you make it clear you got it from us and that the people you’re sharing it with know where to find us!

Fair use doctrine is useful to know when you’re thinking about using CMI resources. Basically, you may use parts of a CMI resource like a clip from a video or a paragraph from a magazine article without special permission, but you must cite your source properly—which may vary depending on your format. This will always let your reader/viewer know where to find us (we’ll give some examples below) and will give your work more credibility. However, you cannot use a substantial part of a CMI resource (like a whole page or a whole article) without special permission. If you have doubts whether your use falls under fair use doctrine, please feel free to write in and ask.

Citing CMI resources

In general, people should know that you got the information from CREATION.com and be able to find the original source (us). Here are some ideas what that may look like depending on format. Let’s say that you want to cite “Did God create over billions of years?” in different formats:

Web

For a blog post, you might simply provide a hyperlink: “In their article Did God create over billions of years? Bates and Sanders state: … ”

If you are referencing it in a YouTube video, you can put the URL creation.com/did-god-create-over-billions-of-years on the screen at the appropriate point and/or a link in the description.

If you are referencing a CMI book that your audience may want to purchase, adding a link from our webstore might be a good way to let people know where they can get it.

Print

For a print format or more formal article with footnotes, you would cite any of our articles, videos, or books along the lines of any of the major style guides (e.g.):

Bates, G. and Sanders, L., Did God create over billions of years? 6 October 2011; creation.com/did-god-create-over-billions-of-years.

Here are some examples if you were citing one of our print publications.

Creation magazine

Matthews, M., The perfect planet, Creation 43(2):16–17, April 2021; creation.com/the-perfect-planet.

Journal of Creation

Humphreys, R., A biblical view restores reality to quantum physics, J. Creation 34(3):74–79, December 2020.

Books

Wieland C., One Human Family: The Bible, Science, Race & Culture (Creation Book Publishers: Powder Springs, GA), p. 131, 2011.

Any citation scheme that tells the reader or viewer how to get back to CREATION.com and the information you’re citing will be acceptable.

When special permission is needed

If you want to reprint an entire article from creation.com or any of our print publications, you’ll need special permission, which is usually granted when it’s for educational, non-profit usage.

If you want to repost an article on your blog, we would ask that you give the first couple of paragraphs on your blog, then give a link to the creation.com article for your readers to get the rest of it.

If you want to share any of our videos on blogs or social media, we encourage you to do so by linking to our videos, but reuploading them to your own channel is prohibited.

We do not allow anyone to upload our for-sale video content to video platforms for distribution. Many of our videos have video trailers or samples available on our webstore that you can share to encourage people to buy their own copies.

If you want to reuse a photo or image used in an article, we generally get them from other sources, in which case we do not have the ability to grant permission for others to use them.