Putting It Together: Integrating Sources

  • Academic integrity means taking full responsibility for your work, acknowledging your own efforts, and acknowledging the contributions of others’ efforts.
  • Plagiarism is using someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as your own.  Adopting good research ethics and practices can help you avoid plagiarism and become a better student.  Most unintentional plagiarism can be prevented by better time management and by managing your sources correctly.
  • Quoting text means that you copy the source’s exact words and mark them off with quotation marks or in a block quote.  Remember to quote purposefully, quote accurately, block quote sparingly, don’t over quote, use brackets/ellipses to indicate edits, and cite sources.  Quotations need to be introduced and explained with signal phrases, you should integrate shorter quotes within your paraphrase/summary, and make sure to interpret evidence for readers.
  • Paraphrasing or “indirect quotation” is putting source text in your own words and altering the sentence structure to avoid using the quotation marks required in direct quotation. Keep a consistent voice, break down a concept, avoid patchwriting, don’t change the content for your own spin, and add citations.
  • Summarizing text is when you represent the source’s main ideas in your own words without quotation marks. The procedure for summarizing is much like that of paraphrasing except that it involves the extra step of pulling out highlights from the source.
  • There are many reasons to cite material from outside sources:  to avoid plagiarism and maintain academic integrity, to acknowledge the work of others, to provide credibility to your work and place your work in context, and to help your future researching self and other researchers easily locate sources
  • Some challenges that cause students to plagiarize include running out of time, having to use different styles, not really understanding the material they’re using, and shifting cultural expectations of citation.
  • Most citations require two parts: the full bibliographic citation on the References/Works Cited page of the final product and an indication within the text (usually author and publication date and/or page number).
  • The three most commonly used citation styles in higher education include Modern Language Association (MLA) Style (used in literature, arts, humanities, and some other disciplines), Chicago Manual of Style or Turabian (used most often in history, art, and visual studies), and American Psychological Association (APA) Style (used in social sciences such as anthropology, business, psychology, sociology, and political science).