Paraphrasing Research with No Citation
Suppose you take the information from a source and explain it 100% in your own words. That’s a good start, but if you leave out the citation, then that is considered plagiarism, unless you know for sure that the information is common knowledge.
Common knowledge refers to facts that most of your readers probably have memorized, and it doesn’t actually need to be cited. But if you are a college student, sometimes it is hard to know if something is common knowledge or not. In that case, it is better to be safe than sorry. Just include the citation. There is no harm in including too many in-text citations in a college paper—your professor will just be impressed that you are carefully keeping track of where your information came from.
Check out the following examples of what not to do and what to do instead.
Note: It is common for academic writing to use many citations. The example below uses APA format for the in-text citations.
