Step 2: How can I keep track of all this information? Improve your note-taking skills.
Once you’ve reconsidered your position on using citations, you need to rethink your note-taking practices. Taking careful notes is simply the best way to avoid plagiarism. And improving your note-taking skills will also allow you to refine your critical thinking skills. Here’s how the process works:
(1) Start by carefully noting all the bibliographic information you’ll need for your works cited page. (See #3 for more details on how to determine exactly what information you’ll need for different kinds of sources.) If you’re photocopying an article or section out of a book or journal, why not photocopy the front pages of the source as well? That way you’ll have the bibliographic information if you need it later. If you forget to gather the information for a book, you can usually get it from the library’s online card catalogue. Simply pull up the entry for the book you used to see the bibliographic information on that source. If you’re working on an article from a journal, you can return to the database from which you got the original citation to find the bibliographic information.