How to avoid Plagiarism
At university you are expected to provide evidence to support your claims. This evidence will come from a range of sources that you must acknowledge by using an accepted referencing system. Failing to acknowledge your sources results in the most common form of plagiarism.
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is taking someone else's words or ideas and presenting them as your own. The inappropriate use of ideas from books, articles, the Internet, or other students' work is regarded as plagiarism. It is seen as 'stealing someone else's intellectual property'.
Plagiarism is academic dishonesty and is regarded very seriously. Plagiarism can be deliberate or it can be unintentional but it is always considered as a serious offence. It is acceptable for students to work together to clarify understanding and test their ideas before establishing their individual responses to topics. The piece of work which develops from this discussion must, however be the individual student's own work.
Forms of plagiarism can occur if you:
- Write about or use someone else's ideas without giving a reference
- Copy another student's work and submit it as your own
- Submit work written for you by someone else
- Work with other students to share ideas and clarify understandings but do not arrive at your own individual response to the set task. In this case your work reflects too closely that of others in the group.
How can plagiarism be avoided?
It is important that you record all bibliographical details of a source as you research. Photocopy the cover and the copyright pages of any source you use and these will give you the details you need.
- Record the sources you use. Before beginning to take notes from any source, record all the bibliographic information.
For a book you need to record the authors' names, title of book, publisher, year of publication, place of publication, pages of reference.
For a document on the World Wide Web you need to record the author's name, title of the item, year of publication, the date you accessed it, the URL and pages of reference.
- Take careful notes. To ensure that you do not plagiarise another researcher's work it is important to take careful written notes. Develop a system to distinguish between what you have copied directly from the source, (directly quoted), what you have put in your own words (paraphrased), and your comments about the information in that source.
- Paraphrase appropriately. Paraphrasing is the process of putting another person's ideas into your own words. Be careful not to change only a few words from the original work. See the section on 'Writing skills' for more information about paraphrasing.
- Use in-text referencing in every written draft. Get into the habit of including the in-text (author, date) references as you write each draft of your assignment.
- Keep your work secure. Avoid sharing paper or electronic drafts of your work with other students.
Source: CLC staff
