What
is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is cheating: it is the “wrongful act of taking the product of another person’s mind and presenting it as one’s own” (Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality qtd. in Gibaldi 30). According to Joseph Gibaldi of the Modern Language Association (MLA), “To use another person’s ideas or expressions in your writing without acknowledging the source is to plagiarize. Plagiarism, then, constitutes intellectual theft” (30). Certainly plagiarism is morally and ethically wrong: this form of cheating involves stealing, lying, and insulting others. First, taking ideas and words from another to use as your own without permission or acknowledgement is stealing. Second, offering another person’s ideas and words as your own in any assignment—a paper, test, examination, poster, or oral report--is lying. Third, disrespect for the intellectual integrity of the source, your fellow students, and your teachers is insulting (Babbie).
What
constitutes plagiarism?
· Buying or downloading a paper from a research service or term-paper mill and offering it as your own
· Turning in another student’s work, with or without that student’s knowledge, as your own
· Copying any portion of another’s work without proper acknowledgement
· Copying material from a source, supplying proper documentation, but leaving out quotation marks or failing to indent properly
· Paraphrasing ideas and language from a source without proper documentation
What are the consequences for plagiarism?
Plagiarism can have serious consequences: you may earn a grade of zero for the paper, you may earn a double zero, you may fail the course, or you may even face expulsion from the school. Some colleges with honor codes expel students for plagiarism.
How
does a student avoid plagiarism?
Always give credit where credit is
due. In other words, learn to acknowledge your sources.
You must learn to cite your sources
within your text and in a bibliography or list of works cited at the end of the
paper. Directions for acknowledging or Citing Sources follow on the next
two pages.
What does “citing a source” mean?
· Giving credit to someone or something when what you use is not your own original work
When
should you cite a source?
· When you use another person's idea, opinion, or theory
· When you use any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings, pictures, sounds, etc. or any other piece of information which you found from any source
· When you use quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words
· When you paraphrase (put in your own words) another person's spoken or written words (Writing Tutorial Services, Indiana University)
What
needs to be included when you cite a source?
· Who wrote or created it
· What it is called
· Where and by whom it was published or produced
· When it was published or produced (Umbach)
It doesn’t matter where you find your
information, whether it is a book, an interview, an electronic resource, or from
the Internet; when you use the work of others you must give them the credit they
deserve. When in doubt, cite your source!
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Works Cited
Babbie, Earl. “Plagiarism.” Teaching Resources Depository: Other Teaching Tools. Social Sciences Research and
Instructional Council. 26 Oct. 1998. 18 April 2002
<http://www.csubak.edu/ssric/Modules/Other/plagiarism.htm>.
Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. New York: The Modern Language Association of
America, 1999.
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Prepared by the Collier County Public Schools Plagiarism Committee—April,
2002
Citation Machine is an interactive Web
tool designed to assist teachers and students in producing reference citations
for crediting information from other people.
OnLine: A reference guide to using internet sources http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/index.html
This site is an off spring from the book by Andrew Harnack and Eugene Kleppinger containing extensive explanations and examples.
Assembling a list of works
cited in your paper http://www.lib.duke.edu/libguide/works_cited
This is the Duke
University site. It has a
dropdown menu to select examples for each type of work.
Citing Sources
--- Examples produced by: Honolulu
Community College
http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/education/hcc/library/mlahcc.html
The following examples are based
on the MLA
Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 5th ed., by Joseph Gibaldi.
(Ref LB2369 .G53 1999b) The numbers in < > refer to the appropriate
chapters in the handbook
Sources: their use and
acknowledgement
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~sources/ produced by:
Dartmouth