HON 280-01 - Part 2: Avoid plagiarism--Take notes!

Test your knowledge of plagiarism:

Additional tutorials and quizzes

Sometimes one resource doesn't work for you. You can try some of these others if some concept is giving you trouble.

Once you realize the basics of what plagiarism is, one of the keys to avoiding it is to take good notes so you don't accidentally plagiarize.

1. Get all the info you need to cite every source.
2. Keep track of what information came from what source.
3. Generally, you don't quote in scientific documents. Practice summarizing the key points of the articles you read: "Jones and Li (2014) found that..."
4. While you don't have to cite "commonly available information" or "common knowledge", it's better to cite something unnecessarily than to not cite something you should have.
5. Cite what you read. Even if the source you read quotes, summarizes, or paraphrases another article, book, or report, only cite what you actually read: "Smith (2014) reported that Jones and Li found..." 
6. Practice using the required or suggested citation format. Even if you can find a source that provides you with the formatted citation, you should still know the style well enough to recognize if something goes wrong.

This Microsoft Word document is a template for notes on research articles. While you don't have to use this template, and if you do, you don't have to answer every question, it will give you some good ideas about how to think about what you are reading.

Different citation formats serve different purposes, but they all use the same basic information. Author, title, journal, date, volume, issue, pages, format, etc. Many of our databases provide APA and MLA citations.

More about citations: