Avoiding Plagiarism: What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is taking other people's work and passing it off as your own. Plagiarism is bad. How would you feel if someone took your words, images, data, ideas or anything else that belonged to you and pretended it was theirs? Plagiarism is a form of stealing, and as such, it's taken seriously by educational institutions. If you plagiarise and get caught, there may be serious consequences, and not just in college either:

Barack Obama's Vice President, Joe Biden, was hoping to be the Democratic candidate for President in 1988, but ended his campaign after multiple instances of plagiarism during his time in law school, and on the campaign itself, came to light. To prevent this happening again, Mr. Biden's 2020 campaign has invested in plagiarism detection software.
Once voted Germany's most popular politician, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was forced to resign his position as German Defence Minister and lost his doctorate after it was discovered that he had plagiarised his PhD dissertation.

Both Mr. Biden and Herr Guttenberg asserted that their plagiarism was accidental, arising simply from mistakes made during the referencing process, thus revealing just how important it is to reference your sources correctly.

Given the consequences then, perhaps then the definition of plagiarism should be revised to read:

Plagiarism is taking other people's work and passing it off as your own, either accidentally or deliberately.

Here are some examples of types of plagiarism:

Copying words, ideas, images or other material from someone else without giving them credit
Failing to cite all of your sources
Failing to provide citations for material because you believe it is "common knowledge" when it actually isn't
Minor paraphrasing of other's work - simply making like-for-like word substitutions, while keeping the sentence structure and flow intact
Not using quotation marks for quotations - this is considered plagiarism even if you reference the source, because the words you have used are not yours
Paraphrasing or summarising others' ideas or words but not citing the source
Stitching together bits and pieces of work from multiple sources, and representing it all as your own original work - this is called "patchwork" plagiarism
Submitting part or all of a piece of your work for multiple assignments, even if it is original and correctly referenced - this is called "self-plagiarism"

There are several ways to avoid plagiarism:

Direct quotation - using quotation marks "" to let your readers know you're using someone else's words
Paraphrasing - rewriting the words of others in your own words and style
Summarising - writing a brief overview of someone else ideas
Always citing your sources - every time you use the words, ideas or any other material that is not your own, you must
- provide a citation in the text (author, date) where you use the material
- provide a citation in your reference list (full publication details)
Managing your time well - you might be tempted to plagiarise if you:
- are stressed:
- near a deadline
- don't understand the assignment
Make a plan for your assignment and get started early. If you don't understand what you're supposed to do, then talk to your tutors. Stress is trickier to manage, but talk to people - family, friends, counsellors

With regard to citing/referencing your sources, this flow chart is from the referencing section, but worth displaying here too.

Flow chart to help with deciding if you need to reference something

These pages will give examples of plagiarism and will also show you how to avoid it.

After looking at this section, you should be able to:

define plagiarism and know different types of plagiarism
avoid plagiarism by:
- using quotations from sources properly
- paraphrasing sources properly
- summarising sources