In addition to having an "acknowledgements" section, you should include a bibliography for a formal paper. It's *very* easy to plagiarize though. If you read a lot, you can inadvertently borrow some particular phrasing and not realize it. Additionally, it's easy to miss a point in your reading, then gradually to figure it out - and think it was your own idea.

I'm glad schools seem to be taking this more seriously, but they still need some work on getting the word out. My daughters get this in HS, BUT for example, last year the older girl got two sets of instructions from two different teachers - but they disagreed with each other.

Also, the teachers don't enforce it very rigorously. One of my daughter's friends actually bragged that she downloaded reports directly off the internet and this girl is near the top of her class.