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TL;DR
- Paraphrasing requires you to understand and rewrite the source and not just replace a few words with synonyms
- The best method involves closing the original source and then describing it from memory
- Proper attribution is require even after thorough paraphrasing, through a citation
- Using AI for paraphrasing comes with risks like hallucinations and loss of meaning
Contents
- Why Do Students and Researchers Need to Paraphrase?
- Paraphrasing vs Patchwriting
- A Basic Paraphrasing Workflow
- Examples of Good and Bad Paraphrasing
- The Rules Around Direct Quotations
- How to Paraphrase Text Generated by ChatGPT
- Are AI Paraphrasers Useful?
- Common Mistakes in Paraphrasing Academic Text
- Paraphrasing vs Summarizing: Key Differences
- Frequently Asked Questions
Why Do Students and Researchers Need to Paraphrase?
Paraphrasing is an academic skill that has benefits beyond just avoiding plagiarism. Paraphrasing involves rewriting another text’s words in your own, meaning that you’ve to deeply understand what the original author is saying and then reflect it. Putting it simply, you can’t paraphrase what you don’t understand.
Academic writing by default involves consulting other sources for theories, conceptualizations, and discoveries. It’s impossible to write an academic essay, thesis, or research paper without referring to existing literature. Unless you can paraphrase well, you’re running the risk of being accused of plagiarism.
Effective paraphrasing helps you
- Demonstrate your knowledge of the source theory or literature
- Integrate existing knowledge into your own arguments
- Avoid excess direct quotation, which undermines credibility
- Keep your writing consistent in tone and “sounding like you”
- Present complex findings more clearly to your readers
Paraphrasing vs Patchwriting
What is patchwriting?
Patchwriting, also known as mosaic plagiarism, involves replacing a few (often non-essential) words from the source text in an attempt to avoid plagiarism detection.
Example of patchwriting
Source text: Regular follow-up may encourage participants to maintain changes in health behaviors over time.
Patchwriting: Following up regularly may encourage people to maintain changes in health behaviors over time.
Difference between paraphrasing and patchwriting
Effective paraphrasing goes beyond just synonym swapping. Paraphrasing often involves changes to underlying structure, combining information from different parts of the same paper, integrating findings from different papers, and critically evaluating or commenting on your sources.
| Aspect | Paraphrasing | Patchwriting |
| Meaning | Restates the original idea completely in your own words and sentence structure | Changes some words or phrases while retaining much of the original wording or structure |
| Sentence structure | Substantially different from the source | Often closely follows the source |
| Word choice | Vocabulary and phrasing completely different from the source | Relies heavily on minor word substitutions |
| Understanding | Demonstrates that the writer has understood and reconstructed the source | May indicate that the writer has not fully processed the source |
| Plagiarism risk | Low as long as source is properly cited | Fairly high; many detectors can now spot patchwriting |
A Basic Paraphrasing Workflow
Step 1: Read the source text
Read the source text multiple times and confirm you’ve understood it. Look up technical terms that you aren’t familiar with. Highlight sections like key outcomes, key limitations, and main implications.
Step 2: Close the text and open a fresh window or document
This step basically forces you to not refer to the source text at all and rely on your memory. If you genuinely can’t remember key points from the source text, go back to Step 1 again. Never keep the source text and your own document open at the same time; you’ll be tempted to “copy-paste just a little”.
Step 3: Write from memory
When you write from memory, you will automatically start using your own words and expressions. Don’t worry about recalling statistics precisely. Write down the “impression” the text gave you and leave placeholders like “Saltsbury et al. (2024) found a strong correlation [CHECK STATISTIC] between household income and life satisfaction.”
Step 4: Write in a new structure initially (e.g., as an email)
Pretend you’re telling your friend or mom about the study you just read. You can actually draft a text or email. The new format again forces you to think critically about the source and what it’s trying to demonstrate.
Step 5: Compare source and original
This is where you crosscheck the following:
- Have I retained the meaning of the original text?
- Are any statistics and numerical data from the original text copied correctly into the paraphrase?
- Have I preserved the original hedging (i.e., if the source author was tentative about a claim, you should use appropriate reporting verbs like “indicates” or “suggests” rather than “demonstrates” or “reveals”).
Step 6: Add your own opinion or interpretation of the source
When you paraphrase a source, you’re not just creating a summary of it along the lines of “he said that…” and “she found that ….” You also analyze and critically evaluate the quality of that source, paying attention to any biases or limitations in that work that could influence its findings.
Step 7: Add a citation
This is your ultimate safeguard. Acknowledge the source with a citation and entry in your reference list, formatted as per APA, MLA, etc. Include page numbers for any direct quotations (or by default in MLA style).
At this stage, it’s important to make sure you’re providing enough information for another researcher to find that source. DOIs are nowadays highly encourage across style guides. Prefer URLs from established databases (e.g., PubMed and ScienceDirect) as journal pages can change when a journal moves between publishers.
Examples of Good and Bad Paraphrasing
Now let’s look at a worked example of how to effectively paraphrase.
Source Text
This study identified three key findings regarding the relationship between sleep quality and glycemic control. First, poorer sleep quality was significantly associated with poorer glycemic control, suggesting that inadequate or disrupted sleep may be an important factor in glucose regulation. Second, participants with poorer sleep quality had higher HbA1c and fasting blood glucose levels. Third, the relationship remained significant after adjustment for potential confounders, including age, sex, BMI, physical activity, and medication use, suggesting that sleep quality may contribute to glycemic control independently of these factors. Taken together, these findings support the potential importance of sleep as a modifiable behavioral factor in the management of glycemic health.
Poor Paraphrasing
Bobbyboy et al. (2026) uncovered three main insights regarding the relationship between sleep quality and glycemic control. First, sleep quality was correlated with glycemic control. This suggests that inadequate or disrupted sleep may be an important factor in glucose regulation. Second, subjects with poorer sleep quality had higher HbA1c and fasting blood glucose levels. Third, the relationship remained significant after adjustment for potential confounders, for example, age, sex, BMI, physical activity, and medication use, suggesting that sleep quality may contribute to glycemic control independently of these factors. These results support the importance of sleep as a modifiable behavioral factor in the management of glycemic health.
Effective Paraphrasing
A multisite actigraphy study (Bobbyboy et al., 2026) showed that sleep quality was inversely related to HbA1c levels even after controlling for multiple known confounders. This finding is significant as they used objective measures of sleep quality in addition to self-report, and their findings also extend those of Vanderdaker and Briggs (2024), who found that a sleep hygiene intervention has modest beneficial effects on short-term glycemic control.
What makes the paraphrased version effective
- Key descriptor (multisite, actigraphy) added
- A strength of the study (“used objective measures”) was noted
- The study was situated in existing literature (“findings also extend those of”)
- Focus was on what the author thought was the most important finding from the original study, not all 3 findings.
The Rules Around Direct Quotations
At times you may want to use the exact wording of the original source, especially where the author’s voice is unique and deserves emphasis. Direct quotations are common in linguistics, literature, and the humanities as well as in qualitative social science where extracts from interviews serve as key findings of the study.
Short direct quotations
Short direct quotations are usually less than 40 words or 3 lines of poetry. They’re enclosed in quotation marks and on the same line as the surrounding text. Note this style variation in US vs UK English: Use single quotes in British English and double quotes in American English.
Example
Gaskell describes Wuthering Heights as a “piece of fire and mystery” (p. 56).
Block quotations
Block quotations are used when you’re quoting larger amounts of text. The quoted text is usually on a separate line and indented fully.
Example
How to Paraphrase Text Generated by ChatGPT
If you’re using an AI tool to help write your paper, you need to make sure that you’re still keeping your own voice. While many journals and publishers permit AI for writing and editing tasks, they often reject papers with flat, boilerplate writing that sounds like it could belong to any study.
The following steps can help you effectively paraphrase AI text so that you don’t sound like “AI slop”:
- Include specific details. Insert data points from your own study and talk about previous studies in specific terms, not generalities. Don’t say “Williams et al. made a seminal contribution to research” but something like “The first intergenerational longitudinal study to use economics data in X population (Williams et al., 2000) challenged the prevailing assumption that …”
- Focus on conciseness. Large language models (LLMs) often make the same point again and again, using different phrasing each time. Cut out the fluff, and your paper actually becomes easier to read.
- Vary sentence length. LLMs often produce uniform sentences. Cut down complex sentences with multiple clauses, and this again enhances overall readability.
As an aside, never introduce grammatical errors into your paper just to lower your AI detection score. You’ll create further problems for yourself.
Are AI Paraphrasers Useful?
A number of AI-powered academic writing assistants offer paraphrasing tools. These save time and effort in paraphrasing, and if you’re not a native English speaker, they can help you expand your vocabulary and navigate complicated sentence structures.
However, using AI paraphrasers comes with certain risks:
- Loss of meaning and loss of nuance: e.g., the AI output presents a subgroup result as applicable to the entire sample or ignores key caveats and limitations disclosed by the original author.
- Increased risk of fabrications (AI hallucinations) where the AI output says something that was never there in the source to begin with
- Loss of your own voice, resulting in flat, boilerplate text that doesn’t say anything interesting
- Greater risk of being flagged in an AI detector
- Increased plagiarism: in some cases, AI might duplicate text from yet another published source while trying to paraphrase yours.
See also: What are the best paraphrasing tools for researchers
Common Mistakes in Paraphrasing Academic Text
Synonym swapping
When you just replace one or two words in a sentence, that’s patchwriting or mosaic plagiarism. Paraphrasing involves changes to sentence structure and paragraph organization, to re-present the original text in your own words.
Dropping caveats or hedging
If the source text contained hedging language like “may” or “suggests”, or added caveats and limitations to certain findings, you need to reflect those in your paraphrase. Use appropriate reporting verbs like “indicates” or “proposes” rather than “demonstrates” or “discovers”.
Over-reliance on direct quotes
In fields like literature or humanities, you have maybe 1-2 direct quotes per subsection, and spend several sentences describing and discussing the rhetorical or linguistic qualities of the quoted text. In quantitative social sciences research, you have perhaps 1-2 direct quotes in an entire paper (excluding participant transcripts in qualitative research). In STEM fields, you can have an entire paper without direct quotes. Always paraphrase first and reserve direct quotes only when it’s essential to preserve the original wording.
Forgetting to cite the original source
This is probably the most common mistake made by new researchers. No matter how drastically you paraphrase a source, you still have to give the original author credit. The only exception is for widely known information, like the date WWII began.
Paraphrasing vs Summarizing: Key Differences
Paraphrasing involves presenting a specific part of a source in your own words while summarizing involves distilling the key arguments or aspects of that source. Paraphrasing requires you to judge what that author is saying whereas summarizing requires you to decide is this detail important enough to be included.
| Aspect | Paraphrasing | Summarizing |
| Length | Often same as the original | Much shorter than the original |
| Scope | Specific sentences | Entire article or book chapter |
| Detail | Keeps all ideas | Discards minor details |
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you paraphrase without citing the source?
Yes, paraphrasing without citing the source is considered plagiarism even if a plagiarism detector doesn’t flag the paraphrased text. Your examiners and peer reviewers are sufficiently familiar with the field to know that X idea has been proposed before.
How do you handle technical terms while paraphrasing?
Core technical terms must not be changed in scientific writing, because that results in a loss in accuracy. Alter sentence structure and non-technical terms instead, and mix in your own evaluation and comments on the research so that you aren’t repeating a chunk of text from a single source.
What score is okay in a plagiarism checker for a journal article?
Journals prefer scores under 20% though some have a cutoff of 15%. Note that this score should not include sections like the reference list or funding statements, where everything is templatized by default.
If you do receive a higher score, check the sources of the overlap. Journal editors are often understanding of higher similarity scores for a Stage 2 registered report, an article that already has a preprint, an article that has been converted from a dissertation, or a study replicating another. Journal editors also understand that specialized terminology and phrasing in the Methods section cannot be altered much across papers; there are only so many ways you can describe an RT-PCR protocol.
Is paraphrasing AI cheating?
If you’ve used AI to help write your manuscript, paraphrasing AI output is not cheating. In fact, it’s highly recommended that you use AI as a first draft and then rework the output to reflect your own voice.
Can I use ChatGPT to paraphrase?
Large language models like ChatGPT are often helpful when you get stuck, but you run the risk of distorting the meaning of the original text and including AI hallucinations in your own paper. Always verify the output of any AI tool, disclose its use appropriately, and never ask ChatGPT to find you citations or references (which have the highest risk of fabrication).
