45c As you take notes, avoid unintentional plagiarism.

Plagiarism, using someone’s words or ideas without giving credit, is often accidental. After spending so much time thinking through your topic and reading sources, it’s easy to forget where a helpful idea came from or that the idea wasn’t yours to begin with. Even if you half-copy an author’s sentences—either by mixing the author’s phrases with your own without using quotation marks or by plugging your synonyms into the author’s sentence structure—you are plagiarizing.

Summarizing and paraphrasing ideas and quoting exact language are three ways of taking notes without unintentionally plagiarizing.

• Summarizing: A summary, written in your own words, condenses information and captures main ideas, reducing a chapter to a short paragraph or a paragraph to a single sentence.
• Paraphrasing: Like a summary, a paraphrase is written in your own words, but it restates information in roughly the same number of words as the original source, using different sentence structure.
• Quoting: A quotation consists of the exact words from a source. Put all quoted material in quotation marks.

When summarizing and paraphrasing, start by determing the purpose and meaning of the source. Focus on the overall ideas in the source rather than the individual words.

Make sure that any summary, paraphrase, or quotation in your notes includes information about where the words and ideas came from so that you can easily integrate and document the source.

TIP: For more information on how to summarize, paraphrase, and quote effectively, see 48c and 48d.

How to

Avoid plagiarizing from the web

1. Understand what plagiarism is. When you use another author’s intellectual property (language, visuals, or ideas) in your own writing without giving proper credit, you commit a kind of academic theft called plagiarism.

2. Treat online sources as someone else’s intellectual property. Language, data, or images that you find on the web must be cited, even if the material is in the public domain (which includes older works no longer protected by copyright law), is publicly accessible on free sites or social media, or is on a government website.

3. Keep track of words and ideas borrowed from sources. When you copy and paste passages from online sources, put quotation marks around any text that you have copied. Develop a system for distinguishing your words and ideas from anything you’ve summarized, paraphrased, or quoted.

4. Create a complete bibliographic entry for each source to keep track of publication information. From the start of your research project, maintain accurate records for all online sources you read or view.