PLAGIARISM

 

For another's words:  use quotes

For another's ideas:  use citation

 

Plagiarism occurs when a person attempts to pass off as his/her own, ideas or words of another.  This is not acceptable behavior, it is severely punished by professional societies (usually in informal ways like ostracism), and there are strong formal sanctions against it at UNI (see UNI Catalog “Academic Regulations:  Academic Ethics Policies”).

 

In your written work for this course, plagiarism would occur if you used someone else's specific and identifiable ideas without saying it was his or her idea (which misleads by implying it was your idea).  The other person might be your roommate, a person who has already taken this course and completed the assignments, or the author of a journal article.

 

Or, plagiarism would occur if you used phrases and/or longer passages taken from a written source verbatim (word for word).  These should be enclosed in quotation marks to avoid plagiarism.*  Words and whole phrases used as technical terms are not put in quotations since there is no danger the reader will think you invented these, unless you explicitly say you did.

 

In any case, the source of quoted material, technical term, or idea should be make clear (i.e., by using the standard citation forms you will learn later).  Often, however, the source of an idea or technical term is given only the first time it appears.  The reader will assume that subsequent uses are from the given source.  (There is rarely any need to repeat quoted material.)

 

These complicated rules can be summarized in a simple way:  If the reader is likely to assume something is yours when it is not, then use citations and quotation marks to make the source clear.  Use common sense to avoid misleading the reader.  For example, if you are annotating or summarizing an article you have just cited, then the reader will obviously assume the ideas expressed are not yours, unless you indicate otherwise at some point.  The reader will assume the ideas are in your own words, unless you use quotes.  The exception to this is that the reader will assume that technical terms and phrases are straight from the article, since you aren't expected to invent these when summarizing something.  So you would not need to enclose such terms in quotes to avoid misleading the reader.

 

In practice, a problem with plagiarism arises only when a student tries to take a short-cut in completing an assignment by deliberately plagiarizing words or ideas from another student's work or from a printed source.  When this is detected, two things happen:

      1.         The student receives an automatic F for the work

      2.         The student is reported to the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs for disciplinary action.

 

*Quotations are rarely needed for the kind of writing you will do in this course.  Don't use them, since paraphrasing the author usually works just as well.