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I'm just writing my bachelors thesis and I need to reference to a book for an in-depth derivation of something.

The concluding sentence in this work is just perfectly formulated, there is no way of making it shorter or more precise. I wonder whether I should write something like

As [4] points out, it can be shown that the enhancement in the second-harmonic power is given [...]

With the bold text being the quote from the book or reformulate the sentence, making it somewhat less precise? Is this even enough attribution when copying the sentence verbatim or do I need to put quotation marks?

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  • If it is an exact word-for-word quote, use quotation marks. If you rephrase it, don't.
    – GEdgar
    Commented Dec 26, 2020 at 12:25
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    Is it really only about the formulation "it can be shown that the enhancement in the second-harmonic power is given", or is the quote longer than that? If only those few words, this hardly required being marked as a quote (even more so as this is a rather standard formulation). Of course, quoting does not hurt.
    – user151413
    Commented Dec 26, 2020 at 19:26
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    @user151413 The quote was longer than this and I left out the nifty part that came afterwards. I did not want to give the full quote as people would have just offered reformulations.. But I'm quite happy with my own reformulation now.
    – anon
    Commented Dec 26, 2020 at 20:25

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That sentence is well formulated but it doesn't seem so outstanding that it cannot be reformulated in different, equivalent forms.

Therefore, I really suggest you to clearly understand its meaning and to reformulate it in your own words.

If you decide anyway to copy the sentence verbatim, use quotation marks or an indented block quotation.

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  • I will mark this answer as accepted as I reformulated the sentence altogether. It looks weird with the qoutation marks. The other answer was also very useful
    – anon
    Commented Dec 26, 2020 at 11:41
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Yes, you should use quotation marks for direct quotes unless you use some other clearly expressed convention for quotes. Bolding doesn't naturally imply quoting. With quotes you may still want to bold the text, or not.

Also, your "citation" is a bit weak if it only points to the book and not to a particular place within the book.

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  • Boldening is only here on SE, I put [4, p. XX ] now. Thanks
    – anon
    Commented Dec 26, 2020 at 11:33

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