When we write others’ words in our own words and style we are paraphrasing, right? Many students and writers think that paraphrasing does not need references.
Well, that’s not true at all! Paraphrasing does need references because it is mandatory to acknowledge the source from where you are taking material, otherwise, you might face serious problems.
If we talk from an academic writing perspective, students write research papers, thesis, and assignments obviously, they take help from online sources because it is not possible for them to write academic papers on their own.
Students take the help of paraphrasing tools to create academic papers and assignments, but their work still gets caught with plagiarism.
Do you know why?
Whether you are paraphrasing manually or via the tool some portion of the content still matches the original source.
And according to the education policies, submitting others’ work with your own name is considered no less than a crime.
Let’s take a scenario to understand the importance of references in paraphrasing
In the image attached below, you can see that we have copied some text from the internet and run it through a rephrasing tool in order to make the source text paraphrased.
How to Reference When Paraphrasing?
Now, let’s run the paraphrased content through a plagiarism checker to ensure whether the paraphrased content is completely unique or not.
From this image, you can see that the plagiarism checker detects 33% plagiarism in paraphrased content. It means we can not fully go with paraphrased content where plagiarism is concerned.
So, what should be the solution to make the paraphrased content free of plagiarism?
Giving proper citations in your paraphrased content can save your professional and personal reputation.
You can do citations either manually or with the tool, but there are some problems that individuals face during manual citations.
In the later sections, we will discuss the problems of manual citation and how you can save yourself from such problems using the Citation Generator.
But, before getting there let’s discuss citation and its styles in detail.
What is Citation and its Styles?
A citation is a manner in which you give acknowledgment to individuals for using their work in your academics, research, or any other field.
Many people take references as the best way to combat plagiarism however, what important is to know how to attach a source, and when.
Well, generally citation includes the author’s name, the publishing date of the content, the publishing company’s location, and the title of the journal.
You can not universally do citations for every type of work, some defined citation styles allow us to know the information mandatory for our citation.
Styles of Citation
APA style
American Psychological Association (APA) citation style is used for psychology, education, and science. In this citation format, individuals need to mention the author’s last name and the year of publication of the original data.
Example: (Joe, 1996)
MLA style
Modern Language Association (MLA) citation style is used for humanities, language, and literature courses.
In MLA citation format, individuals should begin the citation with the title and mention the author’s first and last name.
Example: ‘’Mystery of birds.’’ Directed by Jay Kenn.
Chicago style
Chicago or Turabian citation style is used for fine arts, history, and business courses. The Chicago citation style is a little different than APA and MLA.
In this citation style, individuals must mention the author’s first and last name, the title of the article (Place of publication: publisher, year), and page numbers.
In Chicago style, it is also mandatory to mention the source URL if applicable.
Example: Joe Finn, The Reality of Life (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1888), Pg. 167 to 330.
These are the three commonly used citation styles however, you can not pick any of them on your own, you need to consult with your course instructor to know which citation style is needed in your course.
Manual Citations Vs. Tool Generated Citations
No matter which citation style we adopt when we do manual citation for our paraphrased material there is a high risk of mistakes which gives us no benefits but trouble.
Do you know what mistakes we are talking about?
Citations and references are like a package deal, if you don’t know how to mention references correctly or did some mistake while mentioning references, you are in trouble for your research.
It is difficult to write references manually to support your academic or research work because every citation with the text needs a reference to make the text plagiarism-free.
Each citation style that we discussed earlier is in a specific format, right? In the manual citation, there are fair chances that we can make mistakes in their formatting.
Maybe we can mix the APA citation format with MLA and vice versa. Ohh, a lot of trouble!
As you read the format of the Chicago citation style, you must have known that it requires people to mention page numbers of the source text, and it is hard to remember page numbers while writing a research paper.
Because writing a research paper takes the effort of weeks or months. So, what should be the solution to avoid all such problems of manual citation? A ‘Citation Generator’ can fix all the trouble.
How the tool helps us with references for our paraphrased work?
A citation generator is great at generating citations for almost any citation style including APA, MLA, Chicago, and IEEE.
The tool works effortlessly to provide accurate citation results by completely following the format of a particular citation style.
All you have to do is:
- Go to Free citation generator.
- Paste the source text you used in your work into the input field.
- Hit the ‘Go’ button to initiate the process.
- Within a few seconds, you will get your results in an accurate and correct format.
Features the citation maker
Easy to use
The citation maker is very simple and easy to use as users do not need to read the manual before using the tool.
They just need an internet connection to access the tool from their browser and perform the steps we discussed in the previous section to get their desired results.
Combat plagiarism
When you are paraphrasing text you still need to acknowledge the source to make it fully plagiarism free otherwise, it might affect your work according to Intellectual Property Rights Law.
With the tool, you can combat plagiarism by citing sources properly, it can also help you in improving the originality of your work.
Free to use
The citation generator is free to use with no word limit and hidden subscription charges. Now you can make your paraphrased work incredible by citing the source free of cost.
Conclusion
It is very important to cite sources for your paraphrased text because no matter how perfect you are at paraphrasing your work will still contain plagiarized text.
Manually citing sources comes with a lot of problems as we discussed in the above sections, however, to avoid the problems of manual citation, it is suggested to use the citation generators.
To know the working and features of citation generators, and to know which method of citation is best, read the article thoroughly.
This article is very insightful and informative, thanks for posting.