Plagiarism: The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft.
You must always give credit when you use other people's content - words, ideas, images and so forth - in your academic work. Your assignments and exams must also be your own original work, not someone else's. Otherwise you are plagiarizing: taking credit for another's work, whether in part or whole, and whether intentionally or accidentally.
Intentional Plagiarism
- Buying a paper in any form (online or from another student)
- Hiring or letting someone do your assignment for you
- Stealing or "borrowing" all or part of someone else's work (even if you have the author's permission)
- Cobbling together a paper by copying and pasting from different sources without citing any of it
- Submitting the same or a similar assignment more than once (it may have been original the first time, but the second time you're plagiarizing yourself!)
- Selling papers or allowing others to copy your work is also subject to academic penalties
Unintentional Plagiarism
- Copying something word for word but not using quote marks (even if you cite it, it's still plagiarism)
- Using significant ideas and concepts from someone else without a citation-even if you put them into your own words (called paraphrasing), you need to give credit
- Paraphrasing too closely by making only small changes to a passage, still retaining the same structure and words as the original (even if you cite it!)
- Citing a source you didn't actually look at
Tips for avoiding Plagiarism
Take careful, organized notes. As you read and take notes from books, articles, etc., clearly mark which passages you copy word for word (direct quotes), which are paraphrases, and which are your own thoughts. Also include the original source's citation and the specific page numbers for each note. When you refer back to them later to write assignments, you'll know where you got the material and how it should be cited.
Know how and when to cite:
Know how and when to cite:
- Use quotation marks when using someone's exact phrasing, even if it's only a word or two, and cite it.
- Paraphrase by putting a passage into your own words, making sure you change the sentence structure and other distinctions of the original, without misrepresenting its meaning. Compare your paraphrase to the source and check that you haven't accidentally kept significant words or phrases.
- If an author has captured a concept perfectly, quote it, or paraphrase most of it but put quote marks around the few words that could not be said any other way.
- Always cite paraphrases! You may not be using someone else's words, but you are using their ideas.