Plagiarism using reviews in a thesis? As the title says, I'm writting my thesis and I am looking through many reviews, since they easily collect all the useful information that is general and it would take me too much time to find by my own. They also have a nice structure and "storyline", which makes it easier to read (and I doubt I could improve, despite connecting the different fields that are relevant to me).

My question is, if I follow the structure of a review, many of their citations, but I don't copy their sentences (I reformulate most of them when possible, skip some and add some extra from other reviews), is it considered plagiarism? Should I cite the review(s)? And how? Should I forget about all I've done and start from scratch?

Thank you!
It's a little bit of a gray area in my opinion. If you just rewrite the sentences but take the structure, statements and references from the review it could technically be plagiarism since it's not your idea or work. If you just take the information and rewrite it is fine. And there's the question: when is it your own "review" and when is it still just the reworded one you've read. You definitely need to cite that review somewhere.

What I would do is combining the key information of all the reviews in your own short review and then add something like:


  For more in-depth reviews see ...


What helps is reading all the reviews and then, in the best case some days later, writing your own without looking at the reviews. That way you won't stick to the exact structure or wording.