It’s important to always verify and cite your sources in order to guarantee the copyright, promote and disseminate the work of other researchers and avoid plagiarism.
To plagiarize means to present someone else’s work as it were your own. In documentary research and academic writing (thesis, papers, essays and so on…) it’s obviously possible to take an author’s idea, as long as you remember to cite the original work.
Here are some suggestions for avoiding plagiarism:
- use more than one source to get your own idea;
- use quotation marks for direct quotes;
- note the bibliographic information of the sources you’ve consulted;
- cite your sources in the bibliography.