21 Avoiding Plagiarism

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the action or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one’s own; literacy theft  (Oxford English Dictionary)

There are two types of plagiarism:

  1. Intentional plagiarism – Intentional plagiarism occurs when one claims to be the author of work that they know was originally written completely or in part by someone else.
  2. Unintentional plagiarism – Unintentional plagiarism occurs when a writer fails to follow to properly cite their sources without an explicit intent to cheat.

Take the following quiz to understand what counts as plagiarism

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Avoiding Plagiarism

To avoid plagiarism you must always give proper credit when you use an idea, image, quotation, or any other information created by someone else.

How to avoid plagiarism

  • Start your work early
    • Students often plagiarize when they do not have time to finish an assignment
  • Direct quotations
    • Quote no more words than necessary
    • Cite any authors you quote
  • Paraphrase
    • Restate the ideas in an existing work while retaining the original meaning and level of detail
    • Cite any authors you paraphrase
Paraphrasing
Comic: one cow says "moo," the second cow says "I just said that. Use your own words."
From https://www.virtuallibrary.info/paraphrasing.html

Paraphrasing is not just expressing ideas “in your own words,” a writer must express the original idea in the context of their own writing.

  • Paraphrasing is not just replacing words
    • It is still plagiarism to replace words in the original text with synonyms
  • A good paraphrase changes the wording and the sentence structure
  • Always cite your source
    • Paraphrasing without citing the original source is plagiarism

 

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Advanced Library Skills for Physics Research Copyright © 2020 by Lauren Stieglitz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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