Understanding & Avoiding Plagiarism

Using Sources

The word plagiarism raises red flags and frightens some students to the point of stifling research. However, once you know how to use and acknowledge your sources, and how to honor the property rights represented by copyright laws, you will be able to appropriately share credit with others and acknowledge it in collaborative efforts.

By announcing clearly the name of a source, you reveal the scope of your reading on the subject and thus your credibility; for example,

Placing the Source in Context

If you are writing about the dangers of smoking cigarettes, you will find different opinions in a farmer's magazine, a health and fitness magazine, and a trade magazine sponsored by R.J. Reynolds. You owe it to your research and the reader to examine an article for:

• Special interests that might color the report.
• Lack of credentials.
• Unsponsored Web site.
• Opinionated speculation, especially that found in chat rooms.
• Trade magazines that promote special interests.
• Extremely liberal or extremely conservative positions.

Avoiding Plagiarism

A patent protects the inventor's rights in a new piece of equipment or a child's toy; a trademark, a symbol that identifies a company's product, can be registered to protect the company's right to use that mark; and a copyright signifies original creation and ownership of written words. As a student you may use copyrighted material in your research paper under the doctrine of fair use, which allows the use of others' words for "purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research. . . " (U.S. Code)

Plagiarism is offering the words or ideas of another person as one's own. A major violation is the use of another student's work or the purchase of a "canned" research paper. Also flagrantly dishonest are writers who knowingly copy whole passages into their paper without documentation. Unintentional carelessness, such as the failure to enclose quoted material within quotation marks, is a gray area; while such mistakes are not flagrant acts of plagiarism, these errors can mar an otherwise fine piece of research. It is up to the student researcher to learn how to document ideas borrowed from source material, and how to establish credibility through appropriate citations.

CHECKLIST: Documenting Your Sources

• Let a reader know when you begin borrowing from a source by introducing a quotation or paraphrase with the name of the authority.
• Enclose within quotation marks all quoted materials—a key word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph.
• Make certain that paraphrased material has been rewritten into your own style and language.
• Provide specific in-text documentation for each borrowed item, but keep in mind that styles differ for MLA, APA, CBE, and CMS standards. See the tab End Notes & Bibliography for more information on appropriate citation formats for different disciplines.
• Provide a bibliography entry in the "Works Cited" for every source cited in the paper.

Common Knowledge Exceptions

Common knowledge exceptions exist because you and your reader will share the same perceptions on a subject. For example, if you attend Northern Illinois University, you need not cite the fact that Illinois is known as the "Land of Lincoln."

Borrowing from a Source Correctly

The following examples, in MLA style, demonstrate the differences between accurate use of a source and the shades of plagiarism.

Original material

Student version A (needs revision)

Student version B (needs minor revision)

Student version C (acceptable)

Seeking Permission to Publish Material on Your Web Site

If you have your own home page and Web site, you might wish to publish your papers on the Web. However, the moment you do so, you are publishing the work and putting it into the public domain, which entails responsibilities. When you load onto the Internet borrowed images, text, music, or artwork, you are making that intellectual property available to everybody all over the world. Follow these guidelines:

• Seek permission for copyrighted material that you publish within your Web article.
• You may publish without permission works that are in the public domain, such as a section of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or a speech by the President from the White House.
• If you provide hypertext links to other sites, you may need permission to do so, since some sites do not want their address clogged by inquiring students.
• Be prepared for other persons to visit your Web site and even borrow from it. Decide beforehand how you will handle requests for use of your work, especially if it includes your creative efforts in poetry, art, music, or graphic design.

CHECKLIST: Required Instances for Citing a Source

• An original idea derived from a source, whether quoted or paraphrased.
  Genetic engineering. . . raises for one source 'memories of Nazi attempts in eugenics' (Riddell 19).
• Your summary of original ideas by a source.
  Genetic engineering has been described as the rearrangement of the genetic structure in animals or in plants. . . (Rosenthal 19-20).
• Factual information that is not common knowledge within the context of the course.
  Genetic engineering has its risks: a nonpathogenic organism might be converted into a pathogenic one or an undesirable trait might develop as a result of a mistake (Madigan 51).
• Any exact wording copied from a source.
  Kenneth Woodward asserts that genetic engineering is "a high stakes moral rumble that involves billions of dollars and affects the future" (68).

Next: Summary of the Research Process