Does rephrasing a source too closely in my organic chemistry lab report count as plagiarism if I still have a citation?

If you’re worried that your paraphrase looks too much like the handbook, the short answer is that a citation alone won’t protect you if the wording is still too close. Plagiarism hinges on presenting someone else’s language or ideas as your own, not merely on whether a reference appears at the end of a paragraph. In a chemistry lab report you can borrow the factual steps of a procedure, but you must rewrite them in a structure and phrasing that are genuinely yours. Start by setting the source aside, then write a description of each step without looking at the original. Focus on the logical flow rather than the exact adjectives or clause order the handbook uses. After you finish, compare your draft to the source and replace any phrasing that mirrors the source’s sentence patterns, even if you’ve swapped a few words. If a particular definition or technical term is standard and cannot be expressed differently, a brief quotation with quotation marks is acceptable, but you still need to attribute it. A single citation at the paragraph’s end is sufficient only when the entire paragraph conveys ideas that you have fully re‑expressed in your own words. When the sentences still echo the source’s syntax, the reader may suspect you are merely “copy‑pasting” with a reference attached, which can still be flagged as plagiarism