Reusing an assignment in this way is an egregious academic integrity violation. If you have done a previous assignment on a topic, you can’t copy and paste that research into a current paper without citing yourself. For more information on copyright, please consult these Penn State copyright resources. On the other hand, citing an image properly does not mean that using it does not violate copyright. Even if you are given permission by a copyright holder to use an image, that image still must be cited. Keep in mind that plagiarism and copyright violation are not the same.Ĭopyright is a legal concern avoiding plagiarism is an ethical and academic one. If you use images, video, or audio to support your assignment as audio or visual aids, all of this material must be cited, unless you are the original creator. Just like you need bibliographic information like the title and author of a textual work, it’s important to keep track of the air date, title (this can be as simple as “Channel 7, Ten O’clock News”), and producing entity of both video and audio sources for easy citation. Each citation style has its own rules for these types of material. Video and audio are formats that provide information that can be used to support your research, but these ideas should be cited just like you would cite text. Remember, even if you don’t know who the author of a piece of information is, that information still must be cited. Books, magazines, and other physical forms of text are all pretty obvious sources of written material that you might want to cite, but when it comes to text found on the Internet, the same rules apply, whether you’re using ideas found on a simple website like Wikipedia, a discussion you’ve been following on Reddit, or statistics from an infographic someone posted on Facebook (hey, we’re just telling you what you have to cite, not whether the information is worth using, though information evaluation is worth mentioning). Written ideas are as numerous as the human capacity to write words on things. Guides to specific citation styles can be found through the University Libraries, as well as through tools like the Purdue Owl. It is the responsibility of your instructor to decide on the citation format expected for your assignments, and it is your responsibility to inform yourself on that format and stick with it throughout each assignment. We’re not going into the specifics of each one. There are dozens of different formats for citing sources, such as MLA, APA, and Chicago. Opportunities to find further information on your topic. That your voice is distinguished and different from the voices of other researchers within the scholarly conversation on the topic. Your established reliability within your own work by mentioning the works of others who have done similar research. Citation exists so that researchers can navigate this discussion.Ī well-cited paper or project adds your voice to this scholarly conversation. This is the way scholarship moves forward.
The fact is, researchers in all disciplines build on the ideas of others ALL the time in many different ways, from quoting research papers, to modifying lines of code. Even subjects you are already very knowledgeable about can benefit from citation - referencing other sources reassures your reader that the ideas you are stating are, in fact, informed opinions.Ĭitation does not exist to be a time-consuming step to prove to your instructor that you didn’t plagiarize. If you mention a concept that was not in your head before you encountered it somewhere else, that concept needs to be cited. Luckily this type of violation is also easily avoidable with proper citation, which includes the proper use of paraphrasing.
Recognize the difference between paraphrasing and copyingĪvoiding plagiarism, that is, presenting someone else’s work without proper accreditation, is one of the more complicated aspects of academic integrity. Give reasons for using proper citation in academic discourse Upon completion of this section, you should be able to: We will also discuss why proper attribution is important to the research community.
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In this section we will explain the concept of plagiarism, and how to avoid accidental plagiarism by inserting citations appropriately and understanding how to paraphrase, but not copy, the work of others.