Avoiding plagiarism 1: Quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing

In academic writing, it is important to support one's ideas with evidence. Evidence includes facts, examples based on facts, and the opinions of experts, which are themselves supported by reliable evidence. We find evidence by doing research. This basically involves finding information and making sure that it is reliable. (The links are to parts of KITIE.) Information can be obtained from books, magazines, the internet, and even by interviewing people. All of these can be sources of information.

There are rules about the use of sources:
(Also see this part of KITIE.)

1. If you copy the actual words in the source, you should make this clear by using quotation marks. For example:

Article IX of the Japanese constitution states that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes."

If you do not use quotation marks in this way, it is not clear that you have copied someone else's words, and you are therefore stealing them. This is plagiarism. You may have heard of the German minister of defense who had to resign after it was revealed in February (2011) that he had plagiarised five per cent of his doctoral thesis. This page has an image that shows the extent of the plagiarism, while this page, from the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, allows you to compare the plagiarized parts with the original texts. The problem seems to have been caused by copying and pasting from the internet (コピペ). Either he did this consciously, or he did not indicate the parts that were copies and the parts that were his own words when he was making notes. Later, when he began to write the thesis, he forgot that the notes contained a lot of copying..

When you are taking notes, you should therefore make sure that whenever you copy from a source, you a) show this by using quotation marks, and b) write down the source, or copy the url, so that you can later identify the original passage. Do not copy and paste without being making this clear! Do not assume that you will be able to distinguish later between the words that are yours, and the words that belong to someone else!

2. Normally, people only quote in the following circumstances:

The actual wording used in the source is very important, for example if you wanted to discuss the meaning of Article IX of the Japanese constitution, or if you wanted to give the actual words of the witness of an event.

The words that you want to quote express the meaning extremely well. An example of this might be Adam Smith's "invisible hand".

3. If there is no special reason for quoting, you should put the evidence in your own words, either by paraphrasing or by summarizing. When paraphrasing or summarizing, make sure that you do not copy from the source.

4. Whether you quote, summarize, paraphrasing, you must mention the source in a particular way. Jokyu and BC students should also mention in the source of information that they are using, such as statistics. See Avoiding Plagiarism 2: Identifying sources correctly.