Avoid Plagiarism
Plagiarism is using another person's work without acknowledgment, making it appear to be one's own.
How to Avoid It: Ideas, words, pictures, or other intellectual content, taken from another source must be acknowledged in a citation that gives credit to a source.
Intentional and unintentional plagiarism are considered instances of academic misconduct and are subject to disciplinary action such as:
- Failure of the assignment
- Failure of the course
- Dismissal from the university
Common forms of plagiarism:
- Aggregate plagiarism: Citing sources, but with no or little original material from you.
- Paper-cloning plagiarism: Purchasing another person's paper to submit as your own.
- Self-plagiarism: Recycling a paper you wrote for a previous class, making little to no changes and not citing yourself.
- Copy/Paste plagiarism: Copying large chunks of someone else's work and including them in your assignment.
Vocabulary:
- Paraphrase: Putting another person's ideas into your own words. This is not a quote, but you still need a citation giving credit for the idea.
- Verbatim: An exact quoting of words, with no changes. All quotes should be verbatim.
- Citation: This contains all the information one needs to find an article: author, title, date, publisher, etc. These can also be footnotes or endnotes that point to items in your bibliography.
- Bibliography: A list of books and articles. At the end of the paper, this is sometimes called "References" or "Works Cited."
It is the responsibility of the student submitting the assignment to know, understand, and comply with the Student Academic Ethics Policy.
Additional plagiarism resources:
Content adapted from NMSU Library.
