Student Resources > Avoiding Plagiarism > How to Research Responsibly
The best way to avoid plagiarism is to know how to incorporate the words and ideas of others into your work. This begins in the research process. As you research a topic and begin to gather articles, books, web resources and more on whatever you are researching, you need a way to keep track of where you acquired this information so you can properly give credit to the author of the material.
Below are resources that will give you ideas and strategies for gathering, storing, and organizing your material. In addition to learning how to gather the necessary citation information, you should consider using one of the many Citation Tools available online. More on these software and web based tools is provided in the Citation Tools.
http://bedfordstmartins.com/researchroom/
This page provides links to the many online resources connected to Mike Palmquist's The Bedford Researcher. Of particular note are the many research checklists (on topics such as narrowing a topic, planning a search, taking notes, and avoiding plagiarism), "How to" guides that cover everything from searching online library catalogs, databases, and web sites, to developing a research question and evaluating sources, and links to research tutorials and the Bedford Bibliographer (a free web tool for generating bibliographic citations in MLA, APA and Chicago styles).