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6 CITING SOURCES | MODULE CONTENTS

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Plagiarism is derived from Greek and Latin terms for kidnapping

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is presenting the words or ideas of someone else as your own without proper acknowledgment of the source.

If you don't credit the author, you are committing a type of theft called plagiarism.

When you work on a research paper you will probably find supporting material for your paper from works by others. It's okay to use the ideas of other people, but you do need to correctly credit them.

When you quote people -- or even when you summarize or paraphrase information found in books, articles, or Web pages -- you must acknowledge the original author. It is plagiarism when you:

  1. Buy or use a term paper written by someone else.
  2. Cut and paste passages from the Web, a book, or an article and insert them into your paper without citing them. Warning! Don't be tempted to do this. Faculty and librarians are well aware that copying and pasting is easy to do. Finding the sources for plagiarized material is generally easy to do and VERY OFTEN such a search for the source material is successful. If a student plagiarises in this manner, there is a very high probability he or she will be caught.
  3. Use the words or ideas of another person without citing them.
  4. Paraphrase that person's words without citing them.
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