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The main thing to be aware of as you incorporate information into your sources is avoiding plagiarism. Plagiarism is borrowing someone else’s ideas or words without giving them credit. Therefore, every time you borrow someone else’s ideas or words, you must give them proper credit, or you’ll be guilty of plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious offense. Not only is it against the law, it’s unethical because it goes against the principles of academic research. It’s terribly rude to steal someone else’s work, and it defeats the purpose of conducting research in the first place. It’s a slap in the face to the author who originally wrote or proposed the ideas, and it also cheats you out of the satisfaction of conducting your own inquiry and interpreting information according to your interests and ideas. Besides, if you plagiarize, you receive no credit for the assignment, not to mention putting yourself at risk for academic suspension. I hope I have convinced you that intentional plagiarism is not worth the risk!
Avoiding Plagiarism |
It's not intentional plagiarism that most confounds teachers or foils students. When students plagiarize, very often they don’t do so intentionally. Sometimes, however, because students are not paying careful enough attention to the way they take notes, another person’s ideas or words appear in their notes without the proper credit. It’s very easy to commit this error, so you must be conscious of it from the get-go. There are three ways to avoid the fatal mistake of unintentional plagiarism:
Summarizing: when you summarize, you are condensing a lot of information down into a short passage that contains only the main ideas of what you read. The summary must be written in your own words, unless you are using direct quotes. (Note: You must still record and give credit to the original source, even when you’re summarizing information.) |
Paraphrasing: When you re-state a sentence or two in your own words, it’s known as paraphrasing. You might paraphrase the main idea of an article because it really supports a point you’re trying to make in your own essay. (Note: If you paraphrase, you must still record and give credit to the original source!) |
Quoting: You can use the author’s exact words if you enclose them in quotation marks. Everything inside the quotes must be exactly as it appears in its original source, letter for letter, punctuation for punctuation, even if there is a spelling or grammar error. |
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What is common knowledge?
You will notice that with the first two, even though you are not borrowing the direct words of the author, you are still borrowing his or her ideas. As such, you must still give them credit, even though you’re re-stating or summarizing their ideas in your own words. If it didn’t come from your own head, or if it isn’t common knowledge, you must give credit to the author or it’s plagiarism. If you see a particular fact in most of your sources, you can conclude it’s common knowledge, and you need not cite the source. If you see the information in only one or two of your sources, or if the information is really specific (statistics or studies, for example), you will need to give credit to the source. |
Citations
You give credit to the sources in two ways: by using in-text citations (sometimes called parenthetical citations because they go in parentheses after the quote or paraphrase) and bibliographical citation (sometimes called List of Works Cited, because it gives information on all the sources consulted.)
You must use both types of citation in your essay in order to receive credit.
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In-Text or Parenthetical Citations |
The in-text citation comes right in the body of the paper itself. It goes in parentheses right after the quote or summary of information to let the reader know where the info came from. You need to include citations not just for quotes, but for any paraphrasing or summarizing you do. In other words, every time you use a specific piece of information, or an idea that someone else proposed first, you must give him or her credit for it. So, a lack of citation means that you are taking credit for someone else’s ideas or words, and that’s plagiarism, which as we know is a very bad thing.
When you introduce somebody else’s words or ideas, you should use a signal phrase that includes the author’s name, to alert the reader that the information coming up was gleaned from an outside source. Clear signal phrases help the reader transition from your ideas and words into someone else’s, and makes perfectly clear where the original idea or quote came from. Then, after the quote or idea, you include the page number where you found the information in parentheses. This three-part organization is called a “quote sandwich.” The introduction and citation make up the bread, and the quote or paraphrase is the filling.
Part I - Signal Phrase: prepare the reader for a quote by introducing the author in a short phrase.
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Part II - Quote, paraphrase or summary of the author's idea: Summaries and paraphrases should be stated in your own words and should sum up the author’s ideas. A quote is enclosed in quotations marks and will by an exact replica of the original.
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Part III - Citation: In parentheses, cite the page number where the info was found.
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Examples:
1. According to researcher Alexander Reid, “Ritalin has been proven to help children diagnosed with ADD in their academic studies because it allows them to concentrate better” (212).
2. Dr. Horace Santiago, a pediatrician who has been practicing for fifty years, has seen a remarkable increase in the number of prescriptions handed out in the last decade or two, and isn’t entirely convinced that all of them are necessary. (16).
Notice that the last example is not a quote, but rather a paraphrase or summary of Dr. Santiago’s ideas. As such, you must cite it, even though it isn’t a direct quote. |
Variations:
There are times when you don’t need a signal phrase – for a statistic or numeric fact, for example. If you don’t use the author’s name in a signal phrase, then you will need to put the name in the parentheses with the page number.
Example: The rate at which Ritalin is being prescribed is growing very quickly; in fact, the number of children taking Ritalin has roughly doubled every 4 to 7 years since 1971 (Angelo 58).
If there is no author named (as there often is not on websites, or even magazine or newspaper articles) then you use the first word or two of the title. For example, if I find some info on Ritalin on a website entitled “Ritalin Nation”, but there is no author named, I cite like this: Many doctors fear the consequences of prescribing Ritalin so casually, but are unwilling to deny parents a drug they feel their children need (“Ritalin” 2). Note that website articles have pages, too. You can make a printout just to be sure about the page number. |
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Bibliographical Citations (aka List of Works Cited) |
| At the end of your essay, on a separate sheet of paper, you will give a more thorough account of your sources. Armed with the information in the in-text citations (the author’s name and page number) the reader can look up the source in the bibliography if he wants to know more, or see that source for himself. The bibliography is listed alphabetically, according to the author’s last name. So the reader need only look up the author’s name in the bibliography, and there will be all the information needed to find the source. Then, with the page number, the reader is able to find the actual information used in the essay. |
The last component of your research paper is the bibliography, or List of Works Cited. As stated previously, this is a document attached to the end of the research paper that contains a detailed list of information on each source consulted during the research process.
All that's required for the bibliography is to list the proper information in the proper order. This is a straight-forward task, but not an easy one. You have to pay close attention to all the components of the bibliography. This is one area where the format is very strict, and details such as spelling and punctuation matter even more than usual.
Each type of source (book, magazine article, website, etc) will have a different format. I have examples of the most common types of sources here. The reading in your Bedford book will give you models for citing other types of sources, and variations on these. Read carefully for the entries that correspond with the types of sources you have.
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Author (last name first). Title, underlined. Place of publication: Publishing company, year of publication.
Example:
Thompson, Hunter S. Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ‘80s. New York: Summit Books, 1988.
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Magazine, newspaper or journal articles |
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Author (last name first). Title of the article, in quotation marks. Title of the magazine, journal or newspaper, underlined. Date of publication, volume # if there is one: page #s.
Example:
Robinson, Holly. “Generation Rx.” Parents. 1 Nov 2001: 42-48. |
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Author (last name first). Title of the article on the website, in quotation marks. Title of the website itself, underlined. Date of publication. Date of access – that is, the date you actually found the article. URL (the complete address, usually beginning http://www….).
Note: very often you won’t find an author, or the date of publication. If you can’t find this info, just leave it out and go on to the next piece of info. The three pieces of info that you will always have for a website, even if you can’t find anything else, are the title of the article, the date you found it, and the URL.
Example with author:
Keough, Caroline. “Dark Star Named for Jerry Garcia”. Deadnet. Nov 1995. 18 July 2003. <http://dead.net/cavenweb/deadfile/index.html>
Example without author:
“Trail Descriptions”. Yosemite Wilderness. Sept 1999. 18 July 2003. <http://www.nps.gov/yose/wilderness/traildescriptions.htm>
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Remember: The first word in the bibliography will correspond to the word in the parenthetical citation. The two words will match up, thereby providing the reader with a way to access the source quickly and with minimal hassle. |
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