Class 5 — Note-Taking and Index

Citation
Research Methods — Citation Unit

1. Recap: Two Citations Per Source

• Every source you take ideas from must be cited twice in your research.
• 1st citation — Index citation: inside the text, at the point where you use the idea (topic of today's class).
• 2nd citation — Full citation: at the end of the research/seminar, in the references list (covered in Class 4).
• The two topics — note-taking and index citation — cannot really be separated from each other.

2. What Is Note-Taking?
Note-taking means taking notes/ideas from the sources you read that are relevant to your topic.
1. Read the source and find pages/paragraphs relevant to your topic.
2. Take notes on the ideas — first into a notebook, not directly into the research.
3. Later, collect these notes together and organize them properly into the research.

3. Three Forms of Note-Taking

When you find a good paragraph, there are three possible ways to take the idea from it:

a) Quotation
• Taking the idea exactly as it is (one line, two lines, or a whole paragraph).
• Copy and paste — language AND meaning are kept without any change.

b) Summarising
• Read the paragraph, understand the meaning, then write the meaning in your own words — without looking at the
source.
• Takes the main ideas only; minor/unimportant ideas are left out.
• Uses your own language, not the source's language.
• Result is much shorter than the original (e.g., a paragraph → one or two sentences).

c) Paraphrasing
• Also uses your own language/meaning, but you simplify the language rather than shortening the content.
• Takes everything (not just the main ideas) — unlike summarising.
• Result is about the same length/amount as the original paragraph.

4. Summarising vs. Paraphrasing — Key Differences

• Content taken: Summarising = main ideas only (minor ideas dropped). Paraphrasing = everything included.
• Language: Both use your own language, not the source's language.
• Length: Summarising = much shorter than the original. Paraphrasing = roughly the same length, just simplified.
• Purpose of paraphrasing: used when the source's language is judged too difficult for the readers, so you simplify it
while keeping the same ideas and same meaning.
5. Why Researchers Mostly Summarise
A research paper is usually only 10–20 pages, but a researcher may read around 1,000 pages of sources. To fit that much
material into a short paper, summarising is essential.
• If you don't summarise enough, your paper can balloon to 50–100+ pages, which is not acceptable — you must stay
within the allowed page limit.
• Readers do not have time to read all your sources themselves — they want the main points only, condensed.
• Because paraphrasing keeps roughly the same length as the original, it is not used very often — it would make the
paper too long.
• General guideline shared by scholars: about 97% of the ideas taken from sources should be summarised; only about
3% should be taken as direct quotations.

6. When to Use a Quotation

Quotations should be rare and are mainly used in two situations:
4. Definitions — a general definition is highly concentrated; removing or changing even one word can affect its
meaning, so it is taken exactly as written rather than summarised.
5. Beautiful / attractive language — when a sentence or short passage is especially well written and you want to
preserve its exact wording rather than rephrase it.

7. Why We Take Notes From Sources

Taking notes from previous sources is a core part of research (the "literature" section).
• There is no research without first presenting ideas from previous sources.
• Readers want to see what earlier researchers said on the topic before they read your own ideas.
• This lets readers judge whether your work adds something new/different, or simply repeats earlier work.

8. How to Take Notes — Step by Step

6. Look at the source and evaluate it, to know which parts/pages are actually relevant to your topic.
7. Read critically (i.e., with thinking) to locate where the main ideas are — not every idea is relevant, so take only the
relevant, main ideas.
8. If you plan to summarise but still don't understand the meaning after reading, read the paragraph again before
summarising — otherwise your summary may misrepresent the source's meaning.
9. You may underline the 2–3 main points in a paragraph/page/chapter to help hold them in mind.
10. Then, without looking at the source, write those ideas in your own words/language.

9. Avoiding Plagiarism While Summarising

• If you attribute an idea to an author (e.g., "Jones (1995) states that...") but the author did not actually say that, this is
plagiarism — you are misrepresenting the source, usually because you didn't fully understand it.
• If you look at the source while writing your summary, you will tend to reuse its exact language — this is also
plagiarism, even if it's not deliberate.
• If you do want to keep the source's exact words, you must put them in quotation marks (i.e., mark it clearly as a
quotation).
• Simply changing a few words here and there while keeping the source's structure and sentence style is still
considered plagiarism — the structure/style must genuinely be your own.
• Rule of thumb: it is very difficult to accidentally copy the source's language if you do not look at it while writing
your summary.
• Some of the same individual words may be unavoidable, but your sentence structure must differ from the source's.
Note: This gets easier with practice — the more you summarise, the faster and better you become at it.
10. Quotation Rules (Index Citation)
These are international academic conventions, not personal preference — followed by researchers worldwide.

Style used
• APA style (American style) is used — this is the standard followed across the Arab world (including this university
and its journal), with the main exception being the UK and some European countries.
• APA is very similar to Harvard style, with only minor differences.

Short quotation vs. long quotation

• Short quotation: fewer than 40 words.
• Long quotation: 40 words or more.
This distinction matters because short and long quotations are formatted differently in your research.

Formatting a short quotation

• Placed inside the paragraph, in the flow of your own writing.
• Enclosed in quotation marks (opened before the quoted text, closed right after it).
• You can continue writing your own text immediately afterward.

Formatting a long quotation

• Separated from the surrounding paragraphs, not embedded in them.
• Introduced with a colon (:), then a new line.
• Placed in the middle of the page (indented from both left and right).
• A blank line is left before it and another blank line after it.
• No quotation marks are used — the separated/indented placement itself signals that it is a quotation.

Example structure (short quotation)

Al-Masri (2005) states that "pedagogical factors are related to developing skills…" — the words before the quotation are the
researcher's own; the quoted words in quotation marks belong to the cited author/source (here, from Al-Masri's 2005 book).

Quoting poetry / verse

• Whether verse lines are treated as a short or long quotation still depends purely on the word count (under/over 40
words) — same rule as prose.
• Example from Hamlet: short quotations such as "Who's there?" and "Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself"
are placed inside the paragraph with quotation marks, like any short quotation.
• When quoting two or more lines of poetry within a short (in-paragraph) quotation, a slash ( / ) is used between the
lines to show the reader where one line of verse ends and the next begins.
• If the poetry quotation reaches 40 words or more, it is written as a long quotation — indented in the middle of the
page, on its own, without quotation marks.

11. Private Ideas vs. Common (Public) Ideas

Whenever you take an idea from a source — whether by summarising, paraphrasing, or quoting — you must cite the source,
because the idea is not your own. The exception is common knowledge.

Common (public) ideas

• Facts that everybody generally knows — no citation is needed even if you personally read it in a book or newspaper.
• Examples given in class: "Mahmoud Abbas is the Palestinian president"; "Trump is the American president."

Private ideas
• Ideas/claims that belong to a specific author or researcher — findings, opinions, or claims that are not general
knowledge.
 • Example given in class: "Chinese students are weak in writing in English" — this is a specific research claim, not
something the writer could know first-hand, so the source must be cited.

12. Key Terms — Quick Reference

• Note-taking: the process of taking ideas/notes from sources to use in your research.
• Index citation: the in-text citation given at the point where a source's idea is used.
• Full citation: the complete citation given in the references list at the end of the research.
• Quotation: taking the source's exact language and meaning, unchanged (copy-paste).
• Summarising: rewriting only the main ideas of a source in your own words, much more briefly than the original.
• Paraphrasing: rewriting all the ideas of a source in your own, simplified words, at roughly the same length as the
original.
• Plagiarism: presenting a source's ideas or language as your own, or misattributing ideas to a source, without proper
citation/quotation marks.
• Common/public idea: general knowledge that needs no citation.
• Private idea: an author-specific claim or finding that must be cited.