Quotation

Research

Someone else's exact words, reproduced verbatim and marked with quotation marks or set off as a block quote, with a citation pointing to the source.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — quotation merriam-webster.com accessed 22 September 2026

Merriam-Webster: “something that is quoted; especially: a passage referred to, repeated, or adduced”, and “the act or process of quoting”. First recorded 1607. The dictionary also records a commercial sense worth knowing on a trade-heavy estate — “the naming or publishing of current bids and offers or prices of securities or commodities” — so in a trade document “quotation” may mean a price, not a passage.

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

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).