Library Research

Five Tips for Avoiding Plagiarism

1. Use your own ideas. It should be your paper and your ideas that should be the focus.

2. Use the ideas of others sparingly--only to support or reinforce your own argument.

3. When taking notes, include complete citation information for each item you use.

4. Use quotation marks when directly stating another person/s words.

5. A good strategy is to take 30 minutes and write a short draft of your paper without using any notes. It will help you think through what you want to say and help prevent your being too dependent upon your sources.

Hartness Library. "Me? Plagiarize?" YouTube. 6 July 2012. Web. 23 July 2014. https://youtu.be/TdMg7Yu4mPs.

Need to Acknowledge

• quotations
• paraphrases or summaries of a source
• ideas from a source
• little-known or disputed facts
• graphs, tables and statistical data
• photographs, images, videos or sound from other sources
• experiments conducted by others
• interviews that are not part of a survey

Don't Need to Acknowledge

• your own words, observations, surveys, etc.
• common knowledge
• facts available in many sources
• drawings or visuals you create

Lunsford, Andrea A., et al. The St. Martin's Handbook. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. Print. 

You can incorporate text from outside sources in three ways:

Quote

• wording that is so memorable or expresses a point so perfectly that you cannot change it without weakening the meaning
• authors' opinions you wish to emphasize
• respected authorities whose opinions support your ideas

Paraphrase

• passages in which the details, but not the exact words, are important to your point

Summarize

• long passages in which the main point is important to your point but the details are not

Lunsford, Andrea A., et al. The St. Martin's Handbook. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. Print.