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Plagiarism Tutorial

Note Taking Tips

Hand writing on notepadCultivating good note-taking habits is the first step in proper documentation and thus plagiarism avoidance.

  • Choose a note-taking system or program that allows you to sort your sources alphabetically; this makes it easy when the time comes to include them in your bibliography.
  • For each source you use, keep track of the bibliographic data, including the author, title of the work, title of the publication in which the work appears, name of the publisher, date, and if applicable, number or issue of publication, and the pages you consulted. In short, record whatever information is necessary to properly identify the source consulted.​
  • Annotate each source. An annotation includes the bibliographic data, plus a brief summary describing the content and your thoughts about how useful the source may be to your research. You should also indicate what you know about the author. Is s/he an expert in the field?

Image credit: By Marco Arment from New York, NY, USA (Brainstorming) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

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