Good engineering work usually makes use of the ideas, results, and reports of other engineers and scientists.This set of pages dealing with Sources offers advice on finding and evaluating sources of information you will need in order to write your report or proposal or other written documents, as well as how properly to manage and document all the information you are collecting.
If you don’t give credit to other authors for the work they have done and the words they have used to explain that work, you are being a plagiarist. For additional information on plagiarism, see the Plagiarism page.
(Much of this information is found in Chapter 2 of H. Hart, Introduction to Engineering Communication, Prentice-Hall, 2005)