You cite your sources:

• to give credit to those people whose ideas/words you are using in your paper so that you don't plagiarize

• to distinguish other people's ideas/words from your own ideas and words.

• to make your argument stronger. Doing research on an issue strengthens your position, because it shows you have engaged with some of the other positions on your topic and incorporated them into your thinking.

• to allow your readers to verify your claims and to get more information from the source materials.

Plagiarism is presenting another person’s words and/or ideas as your own words/ideas – either deliberately OR unintentionally.

Plagiarism involves stealing another person's intellectual property (their words and/or ideas).

To plagiarize is also to cheat yourself. In their book Thinking on Paper (1986, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York), writers V.A. Howard and J.H. Barton argue that "writing is finding ideas," and is a way "to discover and to identify your thoughts" (29). It follows, then, that if you want to learn and grow as a thinker, you need to write.

To avoid plagiarism, give credit in your paper to the person whose words and/or ideas you have made use of. In other words, cite your sources. You must cite any source that contributed significantly to the ideas in your own paper, even if you don't quote directly from that source.

You do NOT need to cite:

• your own words, ideas and original research
• things that are considered common knowledge, which include
  • facts that are found in many sources (ex: Marie Antoinette was guillotined in 1793.)
  • things that are easily observed (ex: Many people talk on cellphones while driving.)
  • common sayings (ex: Every man has his price.)

Some cases of unintentional plagiarism are due to poor note-taking from sources. For example, students sometimes copy down an author's exact words and forget to put quotation marks around them. Or they accidently mingle their own words with a source's words. Or they've forgotten to note the article title or author and can't find the source again when it's time to document the source in their research paper.

Here are some suggestions for avoiding these problems:

• Read the material without taking notes. When you find something useful, write down in your own words what you think the author is saying in this passage -- without looking at the source. Then compare your notes to the material. If you have used some of the exact words from the text, put quotes around them. This approach also helps you rely more on paraphrasing or summarizing and keeps you from using too many direct quotations.

• Separate your ideas/words from your sources' ideas/words. If you are typing notes on a computer, it's best to keep notes in a separate document from your own writing. If you are taking notes by hand, keep your source materials on a separate piece of paper from your own ideas.

• Make sure to get all the bibliographic information needed for a citation. That is, you should note or print out such information as the author's name, article or chapter title, book or journal title, page numbers, database name, url, etc. This information allows you to create a proper citation to the source in your research paper and to find the source material again.

• How do you know what bibliographic information you need to collect? That depends on two things:

• what type of source material it is (book, book chapter, article, electronic journal article, web site, etc.) and
• what citation style you are using (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.)

So familiarize yourself with your citation style BEFORE you start to take notes.

• Use EndNote to manage your source materials. EndNote stores and manages bibliographic references so that you can add them easily to your research paper in any citation style. To learn more, see the library's EndNote web site or sign up for a free EndNote workshop.

Put quotation marks around any sentences, phrases or distinctive/unusual terms taken verbatim from the source material.

A direct quotation is usually blended into your own text. You can begin by telling the reader who is speaking, then follow with that person's words. Make sure to clearly mark the boundary between your text and the words you are quoting. EXAMPLE: Brownlee argues that “captive animals must be allowed to serve as ambassadors for their species”(72).

When quoting more than 3 lines, set the quotation off from the rest of the text in a block quotation, and don’t use quotation marks. The sentence before the quotation should introduce it and the sentence after the quotation should link it to the text that follows. Here's an example of a block quotation, from page 32 of Dorothy Seyler's 1991 book Read, Reason, Write:

Summary and paraphrase are terms often used interchangeably -- that is, as synonyms. They refer, however, to somewhat different activities. A paraphrase, like a summary, is a nonevaluative restatement of someone's writing.... The goal of a paraphrase is to represent accurately, but in simpler words and sentences, the work in question. (32)

 

For a more extensive discussion of quoting, see the Emory Writing Center's Quoting Sources page.

A paraphrase restates a short passage and can be as long or longer than the original passage. A summary restates or highlights the writer’s main point(s) and is much briefer than the original material.

Whether you use a paraphrase or a summary, you need to completely understand an idea before attempting to put in into your own words. Otherwise you could misrepresent what the source is saying. OR your paraphrase or summary could end up echoing or resembling too closely the wording and sentence structure of the original material -- which is plagiarizing, even if you cite your source.

When paraphrasing/summarizing:

• use words that are distinctly different from the original material

• put borrowed phrases in quotation marks

• use a different sentence structure so that you don’t plagiarize by following the original wording too closely.

• clearly mark the boundary between your text and the material you’re paraphrasing or summarizing.

This handout from the Writing Center at UT/Austin provides some good examples of paraphrasing.

There are many citation styles. A few of the more common ones are Chicago Manual of Style, American Psychological Association (APA) style, Modern Language Association (MLA) style, and American Sociological Association (ASA) style . If you are not sure which one to use for your paper, ask your professor.

Here are some sample citations for bibliographies:

Journal article with one author:

Journal article with multiple authors:

Full-text Journal article from an electronic database:

Book with one author:

Book with multiple authors:

For more examples online, see the following links:

Using APA Format
Using MLA Format
Resources for Documenting Electronic Sources