Plagiarism and Citing Sources

• To give credit to the author or creator for their ideas

• It strengthens your argument by providing evidence.

• It proves that you have done the research and can be trusted.

Whenever you use information that is not common knowledge or that you did not know before.

You do not need to cite basic facts that anyone can be expected to know.

Example:

In your research project, you may cite research in two ways:

• Direct Quotation: using information from your source word for word. The section taken word for word needs to be placed inside of quotation marks, and you need to cite your source.
• Paraphrasing: putting the original creator's ideas in your own words. It's usually shorter than the original and doesn't contain the same words so it doesn't need quotation marks. It does need to be cited.

For the most part, you should paraphrase more than use direct quotes in your paper. Direct quotations are useful when the words themselves are important or to emphasize how something was said.

Long quotations (over three lines in a Word document) should be used sparingly and typically need to be formatted differently.

Each citation style (APA, MLA, etc.) has its own rules for formatting citations and how to give credit within the body of your paper. See the citation guide for the appropriate style to learn the details of that style.

TIP: When paraphrasing, try reading the original source and then closing or minimizing it before writing. That way you are not tempted to copy the wording as it was originally written.