Public Domain: Writing & Citing

What Is Plagiarism?

According to the Delgado Community College Student Judicial Code, plagiarism is
"The inclusion of someone else's actual words or paraphrases, ideas, or data into one's own work without acknowledging the original source. The included material must have appropriate citations such as footnotes or quotation marks and identification of the sources, published or unpublished, copyrighted or not copyrighted."
Find out more about what is considered plagiarism, why is it wrong, and how it should be avoided.

The Delgado Community College Writing and Research Handbook was written by Delgado faculty Sean Munro and Monica Mankin.

It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), and is considered an Open Educational Resource (OER). Please see our guide for more information about Open Educational Resources.

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A citation is the information needed to locate the article (or book) you are interested in reading.

For articles, a complete citation generally includes:

• The author's name
• The title of the article
• The name of the magazine or journal in which it is located
• The volume number of the magazine or journal (and sometimes the issue number)
• The page numbers on which the article is located
• The date when the article was published

For books, a complete citation generally includes:

• The author's name
• The title of the book
• The publication date
• The city in which the book was published
• The book's publisher

Citations are also used to help readers of your papers go to the information you used.

CitationMachine, CiteThisForMe and EasyBib are websites that can help you create citations automatically.