What is plagiarism, and how can you avoid it?

What is plagiarism?

“The unacknowledged adoption or reproduction of ideas, words or statements of another person, including classroom peers.”
     --From the AACC Academic Integrity policy

Two things to note:

1. This covers words and ideas.
2. The definition says nothing about intent. In other words, “I didn’t mean to do it” is not an excuse!

The policy is explained in more detail in your syllabus, or you can view the complete policy as a PDF.

So what does this mean?

Acknowledgement of words is separate from acknowledgement of ideas. In other words, if you acknowledge that you're using someone else's ideas, but you use their words to do it, then it's still plagiarism.

Direct quotes

If you copy verbatim, you must include quotation marks and cite the author’s name(s), year of publication, and page number.

Example: Control groups are used “to ensure that the effects of an independent variable are not due to other factors” (Nevid, 2007, p. 33).

If you provide a citation to acknowledge the source of ideas, but you don't use quotation marks to use the use of someone else's ideas, then it's still plagiarism.

When do you need to use quotation marks?

Generally, you need to use quotation marks whenever you quote three or more words straight from the original text.

• However, we make an exception for proper nouns. For example, the name of this country is The United States of America. That's five words, but you wouldn't have to put it in quotes, because it's a proper name. You shouldn't go looking for synonyms, or trying to figure out how to put the country's name in your own words.
• Sometimes you need to use quotation marks for even a single word, if the word is particularly striking. So you might say that one person called another "loathsome," and you'd put "loathsome" in quotes because it's important to know the precise word that the speaker used.

When should you use direct quotes?

You should use direct quotes only under certain circumstances:

• When it's important to look at the way that the original author used language. For example, if you were writing a paper on the works of Shakespeare, it would be important to quote specific lines from his plays and sonnets.
• When the original wording is particularly dramatic, and there's just no way to restate it without losing the meaning of the original.

Example:

Martin Luther King Jr. said of the Emancipation Proclamation, "This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice."

If someone were to paraphrase this as, "Martin Luther King Jr. believed that the end of slavery was important and of great hope to millions of slaves done horribly wrong," then this would "rob [the original] language of its power." (Example taken from Conrey, Pepper, & Brizee, 2010)

Do NOT make the mistake of confusing "well-written" with "particularly dramatic." If you have read a scholarly journal article and you are trying to figure out how to describe their goals, methods, results, or conclusions, it is incredibly unlikely that there is no other way to get their point across. It is up to YOU to figure out how to take the author's thoughts and explain them in your own words. This means avoiding direct quotes, and using summaries rather than paraphrases. Otherwise if you use direct quotes, then it's lazy writing. It gives me no way of knowing whether you actually understood anything that you wrote.

Using another's ideas without quoting

Which information needs to be cited?

• You do not need to cite information that is common knowledge (such as “George Washington was the first president of the United States”). Please note that for purposes of this class, any information in your textbook can be considered "common knowledge."
• For other information, you do need to indicate a source. Do this by putting the author’s name(s) and the year of publication in parentheses.
  • Example: Sampling bias occurs when a sample is not representative of the population from which it is drawn (Nevid, 2007).

What about paraphrasing?

• If you paraphrase word by word, phrase by phrase, or even sentence by sentence, you are still using the original author’s work.
• Shifting phrases around, or changing individual words, is not acceptable, even if you include a citation. The point is that you'd still be using the original author's sentence structure or paragraph structure.

“When you have achieved an acceptable paraphrase, it feels dramatically different. It sounds like an entirely new way of expressing the idea even though every effort has been made to capture the original meaning” (Thompson, 2008).

Tips for avoiding plagiarism

• If you're taking notes, whether from websites or other sources, always indicate in your notes which words have been copied directly from the source. Otherwise it's very easy to go back later and forget that the wording wasn't your own.
• Always go back and actively double-check to make sure you haven't plagiarized. If not, you run the risk of the following: You're sitting there, writing your paper, trying to figure out how to word an idea. And, bam! The perfect wording pops into your head. So you write it down, not realizing that your "perfect wording" that "spontaneously" popped into your mind was actually your memory of the original source.

Check your knowledge!

Take the quiz at https://www.indiana.edu/~tedfrick/plagiarism/index2.html (Note: This is a review quiz only. It is not the graded quiz you'll need to take for class. That quiz is found in ANGEL and is specifically identified as the graded quiz. But if you can pass this review quiz, then you'll have no difficulties with the graded assignment.)

References

Conrey, S. M., Pepper, M., & Brizee, A. (2010). How to use quotation marks. Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/

Nevid, J. S. (2007). Psychology: Concepts and Applications (2nd edition). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Thompson, S. (2008). How to avoid plagiarism. Retrieved from http://library.csusm.edu/plagiarism/howtoavoid/how_avoid_paraphrase.htm