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Academic integrity

Summary

A compressed account of a source's overall argument in your own words, much shorter than the original, with a citation.

A summary covers the whole and is much shorter; a paraphrase covers one passage at similar length. Both need citing. A summary usually needs no page number, because it refers to the work rather than a spot in it.

Summaries do the structural work in a literature review: three sentences on what a paper argued, and how it relates to the one before it. The skill is deciding what to leave out without misrepresenting what remains.

See also

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