It is often mentioned in the instructions for any written paper that students should avoid plagiarism and should provide proper citations.
Even if it is not mentioned additionally, it is expected that all written papers are produced without plagiarism. In fact there is no use of copying and pasting of somebody’s ideas.
At any rate students are to use a lot of materials and sources for their papers and thus there are certain ways to use them correctly and to avoid plagiarism. Thus each student should be aware of the simple steps, which would help to add the needed information to the research paper, but will not lead to plagiarism.
First of all students should learn to paraphrase. The available information should be read, perceived, understood and then written with the help of your own words. In case you are forced to use more, than two words together from the information source, then you should put quotation marks.
This is called citing and this is one of the correct ways to avoid plagiarism in your works. In order to do citing correctly, you are to study the available guidelines for each formatting style and be able to apply them in practice. One more approach to avoid plagiarism is quoting, it should be done correctly and citing of quoting is different from citing paraphrased materials.
Referencing is important for any written research, as it also helps to avoid plagiarism.
Often there are concrete document formatting guidelines, provided by the educational institution and they should be thoroughly followed by the students. The number of sources on your reference page depends upon the size and type of the work you are writing. Before starting to write your paper you should always make clear all the issues related to plagiarism and the ways to avoid it.