It is essential to understand when, how and why to cite sources, prepare correct bibliographies, and avoid plagiarism.

It is important to remember the four bedrock principles of academic honesty:

• If you say you did the work yourself, you really did it.
• If you rely on someone else's work, you cite it.
• When you use someone else's words, you quote them accurately.
• When you report research, you do so fairly and truthfully.

from: Lispon, Charles. Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success

To avoid plagiarizing, you should give credit whenever you use:

• another person's idea, opinion, or theory,
• any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings--any pieces of information--that are not common knowledge,
• quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words;
• or a paraphrase of another person's spoken or written words.