Academic Writing: Integrating Sources

Research Papers: From Critical Reading to Critical Writing

Writing in an academic context often entails engaging with the words and ideas of other authors. You must understand the discipline-specific vocabulary and critically evaluate the ideas presented in the sources you read. Therefore, being able to correctly and fluently incorporate and engage with other writers' words and ideas in your own writing is a critical academic skill.

Your goal within a research paper is to integrate other sources smoothly into your paper to support the points you are making. As long as you give proper credit, you can ethically reference anyone else's work. You should not, however, create a paper that is made up of one reference after another without any of your input. You should also avoid using half-page or whole-page quotations. Make sure to write enough of your material so that your sources are integrated into your work rather than making up the bulk of your paper.

Instructors in different academic fields expect different kinds of arguments and evidence – your chemistry paper might include graphs, charts, statistics, and other quantitative data as evidence, whereas your English paper might include passages from a novel, examples of recurring symbols, or discussions of characterization in the novel. Consider what kinds of sources and evidence you have seen in course readings and lectures.

There are three main ways to integrate evidence from sources into your writing: quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. Let's see why and when to use each and the role punctuation plays in doing so correctly.

Integrating Quotations

• Why

• to provide direct evidence from reliable sources to support your argument; 

• to convey your credibility by showing you have done research into the area you are writing about and consulted relevant and authoritative sources; 

• to show that you can extract the important aspects of the information and use them effectively in your own argument.
  

• When

• if the language of the original source uses the best possible phrasing or imagery; 

• if the use of language in the quotation is itself the focus of your analysis.
  

• How

• argumentatively: will follow it with some analysis, explanation, comment, or interpretation that ties that quote to your argument. Never quote and run: don't leave your reader to determine the relevance of the quotation as a quotation, statistic, or bit of data generally does not speak for itself. Essentially, you should create a "quotation sandwich", ICE, as illustrated in the figure.

• grammatically: (1) use a signal phrase (Author + Verb) to introduce the quotation, clearly indicating that the quotation comes from a specific source, followed by a comma and quotation marks to set off the quote, or (2) use your own introductory words as a complete sentence followed by a colon, and quotation marks to set off the quote. For example:
  

1. Describing the eighteenth century, Charles Dickens observes, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

2. Dickens defines the eighteenth century as a time of paradox: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Integrating Paraphrases and Summaries

Instead of using direct quotations, you can paraphrase and summarize evidence to integrate it into your argument more succinctly. Both paraphrase and summary require you to read the source carefully, understand it, and then rewrite the idea in your own words.

As discussed in Unit 2, using these forms of integration demonstrates your understanding of the source because rephrasing requires a good grasp of the core ideas. Paraphrasing and summarizing also make integrating someone else's ideas into your own sentences and paragraphs a little easier, as you do not have to merge grammar and writing style – you don't need to worry about grammatical integration of someone else's language.

Note: Regardless of whether you are quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing, you must cite your source any time you use someone else's intellectual property – whether in the form of words, ideas, language structures, images, statistics, data, or formulas – in your document. This will help you avoid plagiarism.

This video explains how to integrate information from external sources into your research papers and assignments:

This video presents explanations and examples of using the ICE method:

Now that we know more about integrating sources, let's take a closer look at how we evaluate sources of information.

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Sources: Suzan Last and Candice Neveu, https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/technicalwriting/chapter/appendixc-integratingevidence/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Anonymous, https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/writers-handbook/index.html
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/evidence/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

uwpglibrary, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfrBB4oLqWg
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Laurier Library, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCvSCmdcCjY
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.