If you already have a rough draft of your research report written, you are ready to think about how to integrate information from your sources into your report. To integrate means to unite or combine. In a research report, integrating sources means combining your words and ideas with those you found in sources.
There are three main ways to integrate information from outside sources into a research report. Read the contents of each tab carefully to make sure you understand your options.
Paraphrasing
Summarizing
Quoting
When you paraphrase information from a source, you restate an author's idea in your own words. You change the words enough so that they become your own, although the basic idea is still the same.
Would you still need to include a citation for this source--since you paraphrased it rather than using a direct quote?
Yes. The idea belongs to the source that originally described it, even though you have now described the idea in your own words.
When you summarize a source, you describe the source's main ideas rather than focusing on a specific set of sentences in the source.
How is summarizing like paraphrasing?
Both methods of integrating sources need you to rewrite another author's ideas in your own words.
Quotations from a source, on the other hand, consist of the author's exact words. Integrating direct quotes involves some additional steps, since you have to tell readers that some of the actual words in your report came from a source.
What type of punctuation shows readers that some words in your paper are a direct quote?
quotation marks
