Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing

External sources play an important role in developing a well-rounded paper. Regardless of your field of study or assignment, you can use external sources to support your thesis or hypothesis by providing evidence. You can also use external sources to build the background of your research and put your study in context with a larger body of work. These external sources can appear in the text of your paper as quotes, paraphrases, or summaries.

Using Sources Appropriately

You have three ways to incorporate information and ideas from an external source into your paper: quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. How you use these and how often you use them varies between academic disciplines and the specific purposes of your paper. The following are some guidelines as given in The Craft of Research by Booth, Colomb, and Williams.

Summary

Summarize when details are irrelevant or a source is not important enough to warrant much space.

Paraphrase

Paraphrase when you can state what a source says more clearly or concisely or when your argument depends on the details in a source but not on its specific words.

Quote

Quote for these purposes:

The words themselves are evidence that backs up your reasons.
The words are from an authority who backs up your claims.
The words are strikingly original or express your key concepts so compellingly that the quotation can frame an extended discussion.
A passage states a view that you disagree with, and to be fair you want to state it exactly.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the “unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work” (Plagiarism 2010). If you use another person’s words or ideas, either purposefully or inadvertently, without citing them, then you are plagiarizing. Booth et al. explain that “many students do not realize when they risk being charged with plagiarism because they are careless or misinformed. You run that risk when you do any of the following:

You quote, paraphrase, or summarize a source but fail to cite it.
You use ideas or methods from a source but fail to cite them.
You use the exact words of a source, and you do cite it, but you fail to put those words in quotation marks or in a block quotation.
You paraphrase a source and cite it, but you use words so similar to those of the source that anyone can see that as you paraphrased, you followed the source word by word.

Citing Sources

There are two places where you must reference your sources. The first is in the text of your paper; this is called an in-text citation. The second place is at the end of your paper in a Bibliography or Works Cited page.

Citation Styles

The citation style that you use to format your citations depends on your academic field. A few of the most common styles are as follows:

Modern Language Association of America (MLA)
American Psychological Association (APA)
Chicago Manual of Style (CMS)

Be sure to format your citations in the correct style. Also, be consistent in the formatting throughout the entire paper.

Citation Resources

Correctly citing your paper does not need to be a major obstacle in writing your paper. There are many resources on the web, in the UNT Student Writing Lab, and throughout the UNT Library system that can help.

The UNT Library provides students with a subscription to RefWorks. This service stores the bibliographic information of all your sources and then formats those sources into a bibliography. For more information, visit the UNT library Refworks website: http://www.library.unt.edu/library-instruction/library-workshops/refworks/

Other web-based citation tools can be found at the following websites:

Works Cited

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008. Print.

"Plagiarism." Dictionary.com. Web. 30 Mar. 2010.