DQ 2 :Explain what the difference is between a citation and reference, how using these properly will help you avoid the consequences of plagiarizing, and why a summary is preferred.

Answer the mechanics briefly and correctly, because they are easy to get slightly wrong. A citation is the brief in-text pointer — author and year — that marks which specific claim came from where; a reference is the full entry in the list that lets a reader retrieve the source. They do different jobs: the citation locates the borrowing at the sentence, the reference makes it findable. Every citation must have a reference and every reference must be cited, and the two most common errors are a reference list containing works never cited and a citation whose reference is missing. On plagiarism, the useful framing is that attribution is a claim about origin: using someone's idea without a citation asserts, by silence, that the idea is yours. That is why paraphrasing without citing is still plagiarism — changing the words does not change the origin, which is the point students most often miss.

Why a summary is preferred over a quotation deserves a real answer rather than a stylistic one. Summarising demonstrates that you understood the source well enough to restate its finding in your own vocabulary, and a paper stitched from quotations demonstrates only that you found the passages. It also lets you compress a study into the single sentence your argument needs rather than the three the author wrote for a different purpose, and it keeps the paper in one voice. Then do the task: pick a primary research article supporting your proposed intervention and write three or four sentences that give the design, the population, the effect and its size, with the citation attached. Note what plagiarism detection software does and does not do — it matches text, so it catches the copied sentence and cannot see the uncited idea, which means it is a check on execution and never a substitute for attributing properly.