Referencing
It’s essential for non-fiction writers to know how to cite their sources. Tarja Moles provides an expert guide to getting it right
Tarja Moles
If you’re writing nonfiction, at some point you may want to include other people’s writing in your work. This could be, for example, to report existing research findings, to support your point of view by referring to an expert opinion or to quote someone else’s cleverly crafted sentences. Whenever you’re using other people’s work (and it’s not considered common knowledge), you need to be open about it and explicitly acknowledge it. This is not only morally right, but failing to do so may leave you vulnerable for being accused of plagiarism.
Plagiarism and copyright infringement
Plagiarism can be understood as incorporating someone else’s work into your own without appropriate acknowledgement. This could mean either identically or substantially reproducing other people’s material. For example, copying a passage verbatim without putting it inside quotations marks would count as plagiarism, as would not citing your sources or citing them incorrectly.