Preventing and Detecting Plagiarism: Student Guide

What will happen to you if you plagiarize?
You may have to:

• Repeat the assignment
• Fail the course
• Face possible suspension

How can you avoid plagiarizing? 
Acknowledge sources by giving credit. If you don't, intentionally or not, it is plagiarism.

What are some sources that need to be credited or acknowledged? 
Books, periodicals, pamphlets, charts, statistics, maps, interviews, television, radio, Internet, online databases, and many other types of material. When credit is properly attributed, you reduce the chance of plagiarizing.

What constitutes plagiarism:

• Turning in another person's work as your own, and this includes a paper from free website
• Copying a paper, an excerpt, a paragraph, or a line from a source without proper acknowledgement (these can be from a print source, such as a book, journal, monograph, map, chart, or pamphlet, or from a nonprint source, such as the web and online databases)
• Taking materials from a source, supplying proper documentation, but leaving out quotation marks
• Paraphrasing materials from a source without documentation of that source
• Purchasing a paper from a research service or a commercial term paper mill
• Sharing or swapping from a local source (from student papers that were previously submitted)
• Creating invalid or faked citations

Some tips on preventing plagiarism: 
Be organized - from the onset of a research project, establish order while gathering information. This will help to alleviate confusion and problems, especially when the time comes for the bibliography, works cited, and reference pages to be prepared.

Use a note card to identify the following:

1. Source (citation) - common sources:
   • Book: Author, Title, Publisher, Place and Year of publication
   • Periodical: Author, Title of Article and Periodical, Year, Vol. Issue and Pages
   • Internet: URL/Web Address, Author ,Title, and the Date site was accessed

    

2. Quotes - note the page numbers, enclose quoted material in quotation marks, and include a link to the source.

    

3. Paraphrasing/Summarizing - in your notes, indicate points and ideas in your own words and, again, create a parenthetical reference to the source.

To cite, use the Citation Style page on the Library Homepage: http://liu.cwp.libguides.com/sb.php?subject_id=13235​