Plagiarism in Academia

Plagiarism is taking someone else's ideas and passing them off as your own.  Certainly, cutting and pasting from internet documents, or buying a paper from an online "paper mill" are examples of plagiarism. But did you know that improperly citing your sources is also plagiarism?  Sometimes people plagiarize without realizing it.  Here are a few examples of plagiarism:

• Direct Plagiarism is including a verbatim quotation without a proper citation.
• Paraphrasing without a citation is considered passing off the ideas of others as your own, whether that was your intention or not.
• The inclusion of graphics, tables, charts or web pages without proper acknowledgement of who created them.
• Turning in the same paper for more than one class. This is also considered self-plagiarism.
   

Tips for Avoiding Accidental Plagiarism

• Don't procrastinate the research part of the research paper! Rushing the bibliography step of a paper will likely lead to small but critical mistakes.
• Keep track of your sources and quotations as you go. You may want to put off creating citations until the end, but trust us making a bibliography in the beginning is much easier than retracing your steps. Try using a Research Log to stay organized and save yourself some time!
• Ask the the Writing Center online or in-person about how to correctly incorporate the work of other authors into your research paper.

Adapted from Vanderbilt University Libraries