Is taking a method explanation from books and papers considered plagiarism?

Question

I have been reading a few Q/A about plagiarism, but I still have a doubt about the use of books and papers to explain the method I am applying in my thesis.

I mixed up the infos I found in a book and in a paper to explain the method (because some parts where better explained in the book and some others in the paper), of course I cited them at the beginning and I put them in the bibliography. Is this considered plagiarism since I am not using "my words" to explain it?

EDIT to be clearer: I am not doing copying and paste: I am following the same flow of ideas to present the method, some parts where omitted in the paper, therefore I had to rely on the book to take care of every aspect

And at the beginning I wrote:"the method is fully explained here [1][2] and it is here reported for completeness

Answer 1

The short answer is "you have to be careful"; as with everything, style matters, and there might be style restrictions about how you cite that your discipline imposes.

For maximum protection, one thing to keep in mind is that, because you've interleaved text from two different sources, it's a bad idea to copy those things verbatim since each part would need to be directly quoted and cited, and that interrupts the flow. Instead, paraphrase or reword the blending. You'll still need to cite, but how you do it would depend on the size of the text.

Absent any other direction, I'd recommend the following.

• If you have a paragraph of now-blended text, at the end of that paragraph make your citations for the two different sources.
• If you have, say, half a page or more of now-blended text, then introduce it in the beginning of that text as "The following approach comes from [1] and [2]:". (Replace [1] and [2] with whatever the citations are supposed to look like.)

In any case, always make clear what didn't come out of your head.

Answer 2

If you are using somebody else's words, you need to make this fact clear and explicit via quotation/block quotation; to do otherwise is clearly plagiarism, even if you are splicing together multiple different sources into some sort of Frankenparagraph.

If you are making a complex remix of two sources, proper quotation may feel very choppy and incoherent, however, so you are probably better off paraphrasing into your own words instead.