Online Guide to Writing and Research

Chapter 4: The Research Process

Academic Integrity

In writing from source materials, integrity is the standard. Integrity and documentation are interrelated. Without standards for academic honesty, documenting sources has little meaning.

You should be aware of UMUC’s policies concerning academic integrity and academic dishonesty, which are stated in the Undergraduate Catalog and the Student Policy Manual. These policies are of special interest to writers because they describe the act of plagiarism as an act of academic dishonesty that frequently occurs in writing. To avoid plagiarism, you should understand it thoroughly and take steps to guard against it as you conduct research and write papers and other assignments. The Undergraduate Catalog states:

Academic dishonesty is failure to maintain academic integrity. Academic dishonesty includes but is not limited to obtaining or giving aid on an examination, having unauthorized prior knowledge of an examination, doing work for another student, and plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the presentation of another person’s idea or product as one’s own. Plagiarism includes (but is not limited to) copying verbatim all or parts of another person’s work; using phrases, charts, figures, illustrations, computer programs, or mathematical or scientific solutions without citing the source; paraphrasing ideas, conclusions, or research without citing the source; and using all or part of a literary plot, poem, film, musical score, or other artistic product without attributing the work to its creator.

Students can avoid unintentional plagiarism by carefully following accepted scholarly practices. Notes taken for papers and research projects should accurately record sources of material to be cited, quoted, paraphrased, or summarized, and papers should acknowledge those sources in footnotes. (University of Maryland University College, 2001-2002, p. 222)

In general, you should:

• Acknowledge the source of all evidence, from rumors to formal documents. Also acknowledge all outside help, whether from a person; an electronic source, such as a Web site, an e-mail communication, or a listserv; and any other source.
• Consider everything in print or electronic format as protected by copyright.
• Document all written, filmed, videotaped, audiotaped, and electronic sources of information.
• Use the documentation style appropriate for your discipline.

Giving Credit to Sources

Plagiarism means presenting other people’s ideas as your own. It is a serious offense against academic and personal integrity that may result in a failing grade or expulsion.

Not all students understand plagiarism, and some are surprised when they are accused of committing it. The mistake made most often is failure to realize that any borrowed material should be documented, even if it is very familiar to you. Your course textbook, for example, should be cited properly when you quote or summarize from it in a research paper. And, even if you change the words of the text to your own (called paraphrasing), you still are required to provide proper citations. Ignorance about plagiarism does not constitute an excuse. You plagiarize whenever you present another’s ideas or words as your own, either intentionally or by mistake.

Plagiarism represents a disconnected kind of thinking characterized by patching the works of others together without a coherent thesis. If you start with your own research question, you then easily find ways to use your sources to support your point of view. The payoff for academic honesty in this case is a paper that others enjoy reading and that expresses your original thoughts. Once you begin with your research inquiry, then, plagiarism becomes a technical problem, one that is solvable by simply learning the rules for documenting research sources and when to apply them.

Giving Credit to Sources

Copyright Laws

Copyright laws protect intellectual property and make copying the words, expressions of ideas, illustrations, and products of others a crime. These laws are designed specifically to protect writers and artists from exploitation. In the United States, copyright laws extend to works of literature and scholarship, as well as to artistic expressions in other media. Copyrights legally protect the expression of an idea. These intellectual property laws are in effect both here and abroad. Most written works are protected by copyright in the countries where they are published.

Giving Credit to Sources

Documentation

Without doubt, the best way to avoid plagiarism and adhere to copyright law is to give credit to others whose work you use or refer to. Doing so involves keeping careful records of your sources and documenting these sources using a style guide. When you document your sources, you create a path that your readers and other researchers can follow to understand how you derived your findings. If you fail to provide such a path, what you write may seem questionable, and your conclusions may appear suspicious.

Documentation acknowledges indebtedness to one’s sources. It’s expected that students, as well as writers, researchers, scholars, and scientists, declare such indebtedness.

Giving Credit to Sources

Style Guides

Style guides help us produce clear, consistent documentation. The rules for citing your sources depend on which style guide you use. A style guide is a set of rules for formatting and presenting information in written work. Scholars generally adhere to guides related to their discipline. Although there are many style guides, the three used most often for university research papers are:

• Gibaldi, J. (1999). MLA handbook for writers of research papers (5^th ed.). New York: The Modern Language Association. MLA style is used in languages, literature and some sciences.

• American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.) Washington, DC: Author. APA style is used for research in linguistics; human, behavioral, social, and political sciences; education; computer science and information management; business and management; and environmental and physical sciences.

• The Chicago manual of style (14^th ed.). (1993). Chicago: University of Chicago. The Chicago style is used in some sciences and mathematics.

Because of its prevalence, APA style is recommended most often. This Guide to Writing and Research is documented using APA style, and you should use APA unless your teacher specifies otherwise. However, you will find in the workplace that these various style guides get modified to meet the needs of particular organizations.

Avoiding Plagiarism

You can avoid charges of plagiarism by following some essential guidelines in researching and writing your research paper:

• Always start by stating your own research question or thesis or by restating your assignment clearly and completely in your own words.
• Keep accurate records of the sources you use, noting all the pertinent information about each source and whether you have quoted from it, summarized it, paraphrased it, or commented on it.
• Clearly understand how to quote, paraphrase, and summarize information you borrow and understand how to integrate this information in your paper.
• If you don’t understand the source material, don’t use it in your paper.
• Find out which style guide you should use and use it consistently.
• Review your final written paper looking for changes in your writing style or thinking that might signal that you are using a borrowed source.

Chapters 3 and 4 of this guide discuss in more detail how to state your research question, restate your assignment, and derive a working thesis. In this chapter, we will describe how to keep accurate records and will discuss style guides. Finally, this chapter offers you examples of how to quote, paraphrase, and summarize information and cite the source.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Keeping Accurate Records

Keeping good records is essential to help you guard against plagiarism. Your records may take the form of note cards, bibliographic cards, your research log, or even photocopies of articles or pages. Whenever you consult a source, make a habit of writing down all the relevant information, from the details about the source to the notes you have taken from it. Always note whether you are quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing information you found or musing about the information. If you photocopy a source, be sure that you have preserved the correct bibliographic information and page numbers.

Using carefully organized note cards can also help you guard against plagiarism and even help you develop your own ideas while you are researching. Some guidelines for using note cards are listed below:

• Use 4-by-6 cards for taking notes—these accommodate longer notes.
• Write with ink—pencil often smudges and becomes unreadable.
• Write only a single idea on each note card. If your notes require more than one card, staple them together. Staple personal comment note cards to the source card to which they refer.
• Write the source of the note in the upper left corner and the topic, context, or general heading in the upper right corner.
• Use note cards for summaries, paraphrases, quotations, and personal comments.

The following sample note card contains the pertinent information one writer will need later when he or she has integrated these notes into the final research paper. It’s important that the writer introduce the quotation in the context of the idea being developed (systems thinking and organizational change) and then place quotation marks around the exact quotation, noting the author and page number so he or she can easily document the sources later.

You will also want to make note cards with your personal comments to help you recall what you were thinking when you were researching. Personal comments can be your questions, ideas, conclusions, explanations of terms or ideas, clarification of an issue, or even new ideas. Here is a sample note card with a personal comment. Notice that the note card is marked as "personal comment."

The following is a sample of the bibliographic card for these sample note cards. In general, any information used to identify and differentiate editions of a work should be recorded. In addition, to provide an exact reference to the original work, exact page numbers should be noted for both quotations and paraphrasing. The information you need to record for a citation from a book, for example, might look like the following as you are recording it during your research:

Remember the main reasons you are keeping accurate records: first, you are acknowledging your sources, and, second, you are giving your readers a trail to those sources so they can understand and evaluate your thinking.

In summary, here is what is usually required to provide a path to your sources:

• author’s last name and first name or initials
• title of the source and edition
• date of publication, along with edition, if appropriate
• publisher and location
• page number(s) of material cited

For journal articles, you must record the author’s name, the title of the article and of the journal in which it appears, the volume and issue numbers, the inclusive pages of the article, and the date of the journal issue.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Managing Source Material

There are three ways to use sources in research writing: quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. To help you avoid misusing them, we will discuss how to use sources and when. In each and every case, you need to cite your source.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Managing Source Material

Quoting Your Source

When you want the exact phrasing and pattern of thinking or wording of your source, quote it verbatim. You use quotations in your writing when you need to invoke the authority of your source, to preserve the qualities of the written language, or when the original material is so well phrased that a summary or paraphrase just won’t capture the ideas.

The following example shows you how to include a quote from your source material. The sentences preceding the quotation are in the writer’s own words and are used to provide a context for the quotation, which is then used to support the writer’s thoughts and expound on them with authority.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Managing Source Material

Paraphrasing Your Source

Some students think that paraphrasing a source is just rewriting the words of the source in a different order or substituting different words. In fact, you paraphrase by restating the ideas of the source material using your own syntax and words in about the same length as the original source. A good paraphrase shows that you have understood and assimilated the material enough to use it in your paper. By paraphrasing source material to incorporate it into your paper, you maintain consistency of style throughout your paper. Because paraphrasing expresses the source’s ideas in your own words, you have to cite the source of the idea.

To illustrate this point about paraphrasing, an example follows:

Look at the plagiarized sentence below. A student who writes the first sentence of this original source, as in this example of rephrasing, commits plagiarism. Not only is the sentence not an effective paraphrase, but a citation won’t redeem it. This sentence is merely a restatement of the original material in the author’s words, not in the student’s words.

Another example of plagiarism is to describe an author’s idea or line of thinking without acknowledgment. This may happen when you try to paraphrase the source.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Managing Source Material

Summarizing Your Sources

In summarizing material, you present a much shorter version of a longer prose section from your source. A summary contains the significant points of the material, often drawn from the topic sentences of the paragraphs. Use summaries where you need only the essential information from your source. As with paraphrasing, summaries demonstrate that you have mastered the material enough to include it. Also, summaries, like paraphrases, are more readily integrated into your own style of writing. Here is an example of the original source and a summary. Remember that even a summary must be documented.

Types of Documentation

Students are often confused by the many terms used when we discuss documenting sources—the process by which we acknowledge the use of another’s words, ideas, conclusions, information, data, graphics, and products. These terms—citations, footnotes, endnotes, works cited, references, bibliography—are associated with a particular documentation style, namely, APA or MLA. The documentation style used to write this guide, for example, is based on APA style. How does a writer know which style guide to use?

Winkler and McCuen, in Writing the Research Paper: A Handbook, report that two basic styles of documentation are currently being used in research, (1) note citations and (2) parenthetical citations (1994, p. 124).

Types of Documentation

Note Citations

Researchers in the humanities, fine arts, history, philosophy, and religion use the older, more traditional style, called note citations. This style uses footnotes or endnotes and relies on a system of superscript numbers in the text and a related note at the bottom of the page (footnotes) or at the end of the paper, article, or chapter (endnotes).

Here is an example of a note citation in text, along with its footnote at the bottom of the page, taken from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

This traditional style allows endnotes as an alternative to footnotes. You would compile your footnotes at the end of the paper or chapter in a list called endnotes. These endnotes then appear in numerical order by superscript number in a list called "Notes" at the end of your paper. In addition, you provide a separate bibliography where the sources are listed alphabetically by the author’s last name. Where there is no author, you use the first significant word of the title. Where the footnote entry is single-spaced, the endnotes and bibliography entries are double-spaced.

Thus, our entry in the Notes would look like the example below. We’ve included three hypothetical references to illustrate the format.

These three entries listed in the bibliography would look like this:

Types of Documentation

In-Text or Parenthetical Citations

In the in-text or parenthetical style, references to sources are placed in parentheses in the text itself rather than in footnotes and endnotes. The parenthetical note, then, refers the reader to a bibliography with the publication information for the source. MLA, APA, and Chicago follow this particular documentation style.

Types of Documentation

In-Text or Parenthetical Citations

MLA Style

The MLA style permits a shorthand method for identifying in your paper the author and the page number of the work if you are using only one book by that author. Because in the field of humanities there is less concern for the currency of references, the date is usually omitted in the in-text citation. For example, to cite Lauter’s book within the body of your paper, you might include a citation that looks like the example here.

When the readers of your paper go to your bibliography, they discover the full reference to Paul Lauter’s essay. The entries here are in alphabetical order using the author’s last name, are double-spaced, and have a flush and hanging or hanging indent in the second and subsequent lines. We’ve added three references to show you how the MLA bibliography style looks.

Types of Documentation

In-Text or Parenthetical Citations

APA Style

The APA style, established by the American Psychological Association, is the most widely used documentation style and is used in this guide. You’ll want to use this style unless your teacher specifies otherwise. APA requires that you use Arabic numbers, p. or pp. for page numbers, and a list of references for the citations. It also requires that you add a bibliography if you consulted works but did not specifically cite them, or if you are suggesting other books and articles for further information.

When students write a paper or a thesis, they are producing what the APA style manual calls a “final” manuscript. Students who are required to use APA style should get clarification from their teachers about whether they are expected to use the style for students’ papers or the style for “copy” manuscript, which is prepared for journal publication and must undergo typesetting. Many teachers don't realize that APA makes such distinctions.

For example, in journal submissions, APA style requires that reference list entries for articles (considered copy) be double-spaced. For reference lists in student manuscripts (considered final), APA style permits the entry to be single-spaced. Another difference is that reference lists for student manuscripts contain only the references cited in the text, unless there is a specific requirement (by citing references) to give evidence that students have read more widely or are more widely knowledgeable about the field. (For more details, see appendix A of the APA style guide.)

Although most of the APA style manual discusses the correct style for copy manuscripts, the in-text citations are the same for both students’ assignments and journal article manuscripts read by editors and reviewers. These journal article manuscripts are then typeset to conform to the specific style of the publications for which they are prepared. Final manuscripts, such as students’ papers, have a wider audience and are read as they have been written. These differences account for the differences in the styles.

Unlike MLA style, however, the APA style is concerned about dates and requires that the author and date of a source be mentioned in the citation. Notice that the APA style uses commas to separate the elements of the citation. Here is an example of APA citation style for student papers:

This citation would appear the following way in the section called “References,” which lists the sources from which citations were taken. Again, we have added three references to illustrate this bibliographic format.

In preparing articles for journal publications, these citations would appear this way:

Types of Documentation

In-Text or Parenthetical Citations

Chicago Style

The Chicago Manual, long used by those in the physical and natural sciences, shares some similarities with APA and MLA styles in its use of note citations. Chicago favors the author-date citation within the text in parentheses, but also includes page numbers as an option. Like MLA style, Chicago style does not usually separate the author and date with a comma the way APA style does. Full bibliographic citations are then amplified in the list of references. Chicago favors the APA format of hanging indents—indenting the second and subsequent lines of the entries. Bibliographies are not a requirement. If your teacher requests that you use Chicago style, consult the manual for the exact format to use with varied sources.

Of course, other kinds of references require different treatment within the body and bibliography. You should refer to your style guide for examples of how to present them. Most style guides will provide reasonable approaches for presenting information about most resources (including works on CD-ROM, electronic databases, and the Internet), but not for World Wide Web resources. For a citation style for Web resources, see the section of this chapter entitled "Citing World Wide Web Sources."

Types of Documentation

In-Text or Parenthetical Citations

CBE Style

The CBE style manual, written by the Council of Biology Editors in 1994, is used to advise writers in the natural sciences—such as biology, biotechnology, and medicine—about style and formatting of scientific papers, journals, and books for publications. Some scientific fields, e.g., chemistry, horticulture, medicine, and physics, have their own style manuals.

The CBE manual, Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, recommends two methods for citing and documenting sources,

• the name-year system and
• the citation-sequence system.

The name-year system is based on the APA; the citation-sequence system lists the sources in numerical sequence based on their occurrences in the scientific paper and keys all in-text citations to that list.

Since there are two systems, you'll need to ask your teacher which he or she prefers. Keep in mind that the target journal for publication may still dictate any modification to these systems to meet editorial guidelines.

Since the style and format for in-text citations as well as reference lists vary for each type of entry (e.g., one author, multiple authors, books, journals, newspapers), you should consult the CBE Manual for details regarding usage. In addition to print copy of the manual, you can find this manual online. For citations in the CBE Manual style, see the following sites:

• Using CBE Style to Cite and Document Sources
  
  
• Citing Print and Electronic Research Sources.

UMUC students writing papers in astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, health, microbiology, natural science, nutrition, and physics courses should ask their teachers about the preferred documentation style.

Types of Documentation

Citing World Wide Web Sources

Some students believe that Web sources have no copyright and that information found on the Web may be used without acknowledging the source. All material found on the Web, text and graphics alike, is protected by copyright, regardless of whether the individual source or page has a copyright notice.

When you include information from the Web in your paper, therefore, provide a complete citation. You want to be able to direct your reader to find the source you cited. According to the UMUC Office of Library Services (1998), your Web citation should contain the following information:

• Author—Creator or compiler of the information; may include the Webmaster or the organization.

• Year, month, date—Date the Web page was put online; should be the same as the "last updated" date if available.

• Title—Title of the document, usually found at the top of the Web page.

• Type of medium—Way the document was accessed. If found on the Web or through another Internet service, this should be "Online."

• Site/path/file—Address or URL (uniform resource locator) of the Web site.

• Access date—Date you viewed the Web page or accessed the information.

The APA Publication Manual provides formats for Web resources. The APA Web site also details specific information for citing electronic references.

The MLA Style Handbook, Manual and Web site also contain enhanced guidelines on citing electronic sources.

For more information, please consult UMUC Library Services.

Types of Documentation

Citing World Wide Web Sources

CBE Style Manual

The CBE style manual, written by the Council of Biology Editors in 1994, is used to advise writers in the natural sciences—such as biology, biotechnology, and medicine—about style and formatting of scientific papers, journals, and books for publications. Some scientific fields, e.g., chemistry, horticulture, medicine, and physics, have their own style manuals.

The CBE manual, Scientific Style and Format: The CBE Manual for Authors, Editors, and Publishers, recommends two methods for citing and documenting sources,

• the name-year system and
• the citation-sequence system.

The name-year system is based on the APA; the citation-sequence system lists the sources in numerical sequence based on their occurrences in the scientific paper and keys all in-text citations to that list.

Since there are two systems, you'll need to ask your teacher which he or she prefers. Keep in mind that the target journal for publication may still dictate any modification to these systems to meet editorial guidelines.

Since the style and format for in-text citations as well as reference lists vary for each type of entry (e.g., one author, multiple authors, books, journals, newspapers), you should consult the CBE Manual for details regarding usage. In addition to print copy of the manual, you can find this manual online. For citations in the CBE Manual style, see the following sites:

• Using CBE Style to Cite and Document Sources
  
  
• Citing Print and Electronic Research Sources.

UMUC students writing papers in astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, health, microbiology, natural science, nutrition, and physics courses should ask their teachers about the preferred documentation style.

Types of Documentation

Bibliographies and Source Lists

A bibliography is a list of books and other references an author has used in a research paper. This list may be titled Bibliography, Selected Bibliography, or Works Consulted, depending on the style manual you are using. For these lists, the author includes references not specifically cited in the text but consulted for general information. If the list includes only the works cited in the text, it is called Works Cited, Literature Cited, or References. Although there are others, these titles are the most commonly used.

Bibliographies are usually placed at the ends of papers. If your research paper has chapters, you would include a list of references at the end of the chapter for the works cited in that chapter.

A special kind of bibliography, the annotated bibliography, is often used to direct your readers to other books and resources on your topic. Such bibliographies offer a few lines of information about each source. Your teacher may ask you to write an informal literature review or a bibliographical essay using an annotated bibliography. By surveying the literature broadly, you can begin to narrow down a topic for your research assignment.

Here’s an example of an annotated bibliographic entry, using MLA style:

Here’s an example of an annotated bibliography for this chapter, using APA style. In these bibliographies, not all items have to be annotated.

Your bibliography may be on note cards that can be rearranged as your priorities change or on the computer so you can print out the entire list when you are doing research. As you compile your notes for your research and narrow down your ideas, your bibliography will evolve until you have the final bibliography for your research.

Integrating Sources

In general, you should strive to make your presence known in your writing and not let your sources of information dominate the content. To do this, you must be the stage manager. You pointedly introduce the quotations, paraphrases, and summaries, selecting relevant evidence and creating context or interpreting importance for the reader. Thus, with your management, your reader becomes aware of the voices of other authorities. The following suggestions may help you avoid overusing your sources when you write:

• Always introduce a paragraph with a sentence that you believe is your own thought on the subject matter. This sentence can be a topic sentence that makes a transition from the ideas of the preceding paragraph to new ideas or evidence or one that states a hypothesis that you want to prove within the paragraph.

• Avoid long quotations that are not surrounded by your own interpretation or opinion. You should examine the number and nature of quotations after writing the paper to detect overuse or inappropriate use.

• Avoid using sources you don’t understand because you will have to use someone else’s words to integrate the source into your paper.

• Do not allow your readers to interpret too much on their own. Avoid the temptation to include uncommented-on quotations simply for effect.

• Never include quotations that do not add to your paper’s argument, even though they may prove that you have done research. Even when your teacher requires you to refer to a specified number of outside resources, always include only those references that add value to your paper.

A good practice is to acknowledge all sources from which you borrow. However, you don’t need to cite sources for familiar proverbs or aphorisms, such as A stitch in time saves nine, Art imitates life, or Feed a cold; starve a fever. Nor do you need to cite sources for common knowledge, such as Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth while attending a performance at Ford’s Theater or The sum of the angles of any right triangle equals 180 degrees. An effective rule to follow is that if you are in doubt about whether to cite your source, you should cite it. This is a case when it is better to err on the side of caution than to leave out the appropriate documentation and possibly commit plagiarism.

Another kind of plagiarism is turning in a paper that you have purchased or borrowed from someone else or that you have written for a previous class or a current class. Such behavior is simply academic dishonesty in a broad form.

All colleges and universities have documented requirements for academic integrity that are stringently enforced. In general, the penalty for deliberate plagiarism is expulsion. In almost every instance (deliberate or inadvertent), if you plagiarize you will fail the course in which you plagiarized, and there may be other penalties. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to understand how it occurs and to plan your research assignments so that you always know what material you are using from other sources. If you have doubts about how to document sources, discuss them with your teacher, adviser, a librarian, or other college staff.