Paraphrase

Research

Restating someone else's idea in your own words and sentence structure while still citing the source — distinct from quotation, which preserves the original wording exactly.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — paraphrase merriam-webster.com accessed 22 September 2026
2. US Office of Research Integrity — Definition of research misconduct ori.hhs.gov accessed 17 September 2026

Merriam-Webster: “a restatement of a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form”. From Greek paraphrazein, built on phrazein, to point out; first recorded 1548. The dictionary defines the act. The duty to cite a paraphrase comes from somewhere else, and it is worth knowing where: the US Office of Research Integrity defines plagiarism as “The appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit”. Ideas sits in that list before words — which is precisely why rewording a source does not discharge the obligation to credit it.

Merriam-Webster is cited as the dictionary of record: where an entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it. How the term is used in research writing, above, is this lexicon’s own reading.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.