Research Process: A Step-By-Step Guide: Avoid Plagiarism

When using someone else's words or ideas in your research paper, avoid plagiarizing by either quoting or paraphrasing them and then cite the author.

• ​Quoting means using someone else's exact words.
• Paraphrasing is putting someone else's words or ideas into your own words.
• Citing means giving basic information about the original source you used—enough that someone else could track it down.

Use direct quotes and paraphrasing to support your own ideas, not replace them — and be sure you always give the original author credit.

When you quote someone's exact words in your paper, put their words in quotation marks and tell your reader who said or wrote the words by citing the author.

Here are two examples of how to do this:

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools" (King, 1964).

or

As Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. said, "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools" (1964).

The information in parentheses is called an in-text citation. The citation shows that this quote is from Dr. King and he said these words in 1964.

You will have these short citations within the body of your paper then more complete citations in a list at the end of your paper in your "References" or "Works Cited" page.

The citation method we're using here is called APA. Other common citation methods are MLA and Chicago. (We'll be discussing citation methods some more later in the tutorial.)

Quote from Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., speech at St Louis, 22 March 1964, in St Louis Post-Dispatch 23 March 1964. Photo from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr..jpg

Avoid Plagiarism is adapted and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License from the "Plagiarism Research Guide" by the San Jose State University Library. 

Direct quotes are pretty easy to understand. Paraphrasing is more challenging. 

Even when you are using your own words, the ideas are still taken from someone else and must be cited. 

Paraphrasing is not simply rearranging or rewording an original passage. Correct paraphrasing consists of:

1. Reading the original passage,
2. Understanding what the original author is saying,
3. Synthesizing (putting together) the information, 
4. Expressing your understanding of these ideas in your own words and then
5. Citing the original author.

Paraphrasing properly not only keeps you from plagiarizing, it helps you really learn and understand the original source material. It also can make you a more skilled writer. 

When you use an exact phrase from the original passage, but paraphrase the rest, the original phrase needs to be in quotation marks. For example, the passage below is from the following book (cited in MLA format):

Wells, Paul. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. London: Wallflower, 2000. Print.

Original Passage:

"The horror genre has become increasingly concerned with the relative and fragile nature of existence."

Acceptable Paraphrase
(with in-text citation to the exact page of the book):

Horror films often examine the "relative and fragile nature" of humanity and what it means to exist (Wells 9).

Photo from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Frankenstein's_monster_%28Boris_Karloff%29.jpg