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Citing Your Work

Learn how to cite your work, and discover tool to help you write and cite most efficiently.

iThenticate

Check Your Work for Plagiarism

iThenticate is a plagiarism detection service made available for free for MD Anderson employees.  

Plagiarism

About Plagiarism

  • Taking a person’s ideas or words and presenting them as one’s own.
  • Using information without crediting the source.
  • Presenting a new or original product derived from an existing source. 

Plagiarism. Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute. Accessed on August 15, 2022. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/plagiarism.

Help

Avoiding Plagiarism

  • Take careful notes when you listen or read
  • Cite your writing using in-text citations in the body of a paper and references listed at the end of a paper 
  • Consult professional style guides for help in properly citing your work
  • Ask this question: Did this idea or information originate from my brain?  If the answer is No, cite the information. 

Use the table here to learn when your writing should be cited. 

When to Cite  

Ideas & Words

  • Someone else's words
  • Someone else's idea
  • Your interpretation of someone else's idea
  • Your reaction to someone else's idea
  • Factual statements/claims

Quoting & Paraphrasing

  • Quotations should be used sparingly
  • Quotations must be identical to the original work
  • Quotations must be attributed to the original author
  • Paraphrases must be cited
  • Using synonyms is not paraphrasing, it's plagiarism