Plagiarism: Home

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is using others’ ideas and words without clearly acknowledging the source of that information.

Plagiarism includes:

1. Quoting material without giving credit to the author. Always put quotations around words
or sentences taken from the original text.

2. Passing off another's idea as your own, even if it's been reworded. Changing wording
doesn't avoid plagiarism. The underlying idea of plagiarism is unacknowledged borrowing of ideas, not specific words.

3. Copying a passage's structure or argument without giving credit to the author. Suppose a source states a topic and three supporting points. If you copy those ideas, including
the examples or supporting points, you need to provide a citation to the original document.

4. Hiding the amount to which you've borrowed from a text or source. Citing a specific
passage in a work does not allow you to copy the entire work without citation. All ideas must be
cited in the document.

Citing Sources for Academic Research

When doing research for papers and projects, it is necessary to properly acknowledge authors whose work has been used in your end product.
This acknowledgement takes place in your

• parenthetical references
• footnotes and endnotes
• works cited pages/reference lists
• bibliographies

There are many documentation styles used by a variety of academic disciplines. Some of the standard styles for disciplines are:  

• APA (typically used for social sciences)
• MLA (typically used for liberal arts and humanities)
• Chicago/Turabian (typically used for literature, history, the arts, and physical and natural sciences)
• AMA (typically used for medical and scientific publications)
• ACS (typically used for chemistry related publications)
• Scientific (CBE / CSE) style (typically used for scientific journal publications)

Chesney, Daniel. "Plagiarism." YouTube, 26 Apr. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/
          watch?v=SECG_ZeJlBY