If you cook a dish from someone's recipe and serve it as your own invention, that's theft — you name the chef. Citation gives that credit in research, and research ethics keep your evidence honest instead of quietly rewritten to fit your story.
Scholarship is a conversation with receipts
Citation lets readers trace your evidence, credits others' work, and lets your claims be checked. Quoting reproduces exact words in quotation marks with a reference; paraphrasing restates an idea in your own words and still requires a citation. Presenting either without attribution is plagiarism.
A common mistake: rewording a source but omitting the citation. The idea is still borrowed — attribution is required whether you quote or paraphrase.
Beyond citation, research ethics covers honest reporting (no fabricating or selectively hiding data), informed consent for human subjects, and disclosing conflicts of interest.
- You restate a scholar's argument entirely in your own words.
- You did not copy any exact phrasing.
- Decide whether a citation is still required.
What you should see: Yes — a paraphrase borrows the idea, so it must be cited even though no words were copied; omitting the citation is plagiarism.