Plagiarism and how to avoid it

From BUE CMS

Academic honesty

When you have found the relevant information for your essay or assignment, you need to be able to present it in an ethical way. By ethical we mean being aware of right and wrong conduct, being honest, knowing the correct methods to use in presenting information and understanding any legal requirements. This means that you have to be aware that laws exist to protect intellectual property. The World Intellectual Property Organisation says that “intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.” (WIPO http://www.wipo.int)

Intellectual property is protected by copyright law. For an explantation of copyright go to copyright. So we see that:

• copyright is likely to apply to all of the books and journals we read at University, and
• what we are allowed to copy is limited

However, if you are allowed to photocopy a limited amount of material, such as a single issue of a journal article under Fair Dealing, what is to stop you handing it in as your assignment?

	It is wrong to try and pass someone else's ideas off as your own.
	This can get confusing in an academic environment. After all, you are encouraged to read as widely as possible and to build on other people's work and ideas.
	However you must make it very clear when an idea or thought is your own, and when it comes from someone else. To do this, you must learn how to cite other people's work. See the Style Guide for information on citation and referencing. Click Here

If you fail to follow correct referencing procedures and acknowledge your sources, even if you put other people’s ideas into your own words, you may be guilty of plagiarism.

What is Plagiarism?

Definition ‘Plagiarism; namely submitting work as the candidate’s own of which the candidate is not the author. This includes failure to acknowledge clearly and explicitly the ideas, words or work of another person whether these are published or unpublished.’ (BUE Examination and assessment regulations 2007)

If we had not put the quote in inverted commas (quotation marks) and written the source where we found the definition, we would have been guilty of plagiarism. Plagiarism is copying somebody else’s ideas and saying that it is your own work. This includes writing, maps, pictures, music, photographs – anything that uses another person’s thought. If you use it without acknowledgement to them, this is PLAGIARISM! Even if you plagiarise accidentally, you will still be guilty of plagiarism and the consequences can be serious.

It is important to understand what is and is not plagiarism to avoid unintentionally plagiarising when producing a piece of work. People plagiarise for many different reasons:

• because they cannot understand how to approach a task; they have not left enough time to do it; they are not aware of how to reference their sources properly;
• or they do understand and deliberately plagiarise.

Some tips to help you avoid plagiarism are:

• Follow correct citation and referencing procedure
• Keep bibliographic records
• Make notes in your own words
• Manage your time

Discussing your work with your fellow students (your peers) is one of the most important parts of the learning process at University and should be encouraged. However working too closely with colleagues can result in accusations of copying and collusion. The following are tips to help avoid this problem:

1. Always use your own words in your assignments rather than copying the words used by your peers, even for small sections.
2. Feel free to discuss your problems, interpretations and arguments with your peers when this is appropriate. But when it comes to producing your work ensure you have developed your own unique interpretation rather than adopting an agreed shared opinion.
3. If you do draw on the contribution of a peer in the completion of an assignment make sure you clearly acknowledge this in the assignment (this acknowledgement should include who the source was, and the nature of the contribution).

Different assignments may vary in what is acceptable and unacceptable practice in working with your peers (particularly where this involves group work). If you are in any doubt you should seek clarification from the academic member of staff before proceeding.

We could easily be tempted to hand in work that we know is not our own and hope the lecturer won't notice. However, lecturers do notice and the university takes it seriously. The response is the same whether the plagiarism is done innocently, ignorantly or deliberately - you may fail that piece of work and in some cases the module or programme. For a full list of penalties relating to plagiarism, please consult the BUE Examination and Assessment regulations.

So, to summarise:

It is plagiarism to: copy material from other people including fellow students and use it as though it was your own incorporate published material into a piece of your work without acknowledging where it came from steal somebody else's ideas and use them as though they were your own. create a piece of work by cutting and pasting sections of text and/or images from the internet into your essay. Note: if you purchase a paper from a commercial service including Internet sites, whether pre-written or specially prepared for you, or ask another person to write your essay for you, this is cheating and will be dealt with severely.

It is not plagiarism to: discuss and share your ideas with others providing the final piece of work is your own use quotes and references in your work (be careful though, you may lose marks if you don't produce some ideas and opinions of your own!) use other people's ideas as long as you acknowledge them as the source and provide a reference collaborate with others in a piece of group work providing everybody's contribution to the work is acknowledged.

(Additional material reproduced by kind permission of Loughborough University Library http://www.lboro.ac.uk/library/InfoTrail/Intro )