Ethical Use of Information: A Short Introduction: Understanding Plagiarism

Here are just a few books from one of our ebook databases that speak to the issue of plagiarism and how to avoid it.

Many of our eReference books discuss issues like Plagiarism.  Here is an entry from the Sage Encyclopedia of Social Problems

Although I cannot reprint the article, I can provide a proxyized link.  If you are off-campus, you will be asked to authenticate as a Suffolk user before viewing the entry.

Plagiarism is using someone else's words, thoughts, ideas, conclusions or other work and re-purposing them into your own work without crediting the original author or creator.  Along with falsifying research data, plagiarism is one of the great sins of academic work.  No one should do it.  And although you might know that copying and pasting a big section of a scholarly research article or an encyclopedia entry into your paper without citing the source is wrong, there may be "gray" areas of utilizing other people's work that are less clear to you.  But here's a good, safe rule:  If an idea or phrase or paragraph did not come out of your own head...cite it!  You will seldom be rebuked for over-citing in a paper.  But you could get in SERIOUS trouble for "forgetting" to cite work that is not your own.

Rather than write detailed notes on what plagiarism is and how to avoid it, it seems more appropriate to simply refer interested students and faculty to a variety of useful materials found on the web.  That list of links is below.  And links to a few things in our ebooks can be found to the left.

This short video, posted by PhilosophyFreak, takes the form of a simply flow chart.  It explains a crucial issue in understanding what must be cited.  Other videos from the Critical Thinker Academy on avoiding plagiarism and citing sources properly can be found on YouTube here.