Plagiarism Tutorial

Learning Objectives

After completing this tutorial, you should be able to:

• recognize plagiarism in its various forms
• understand why avoiding plagiarism is important
• develop skills for avoiding plagiarism. These skills include:
  • citing sources
  • note-taking
  • quoting
  • paraphrasing

You'll be asked to complete a self-test to see if you can recognize examples of plagiarism. This will help you identify areas where you may want to work on building your skills.

Watch the video clip of Jayson Blair's story

1. What do you think led Jayson Blair to violate the Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics?

2. Knowing that this has happened, can you trust that what you are seeing, reading or hearing from news outlets (print, cable, online, social media) is truthful and accurate information? Why is this important?

Plagiarism is a broad term meaning the use of previously existing work without properly crediting the original source. It could be as deliberate as submitting someone else’s work as your own or as accidental as forgetting to add quotation marks. In academics, plagiarism constitutes an ethical violation, as all research builds on the knowledge that came before. Whether it is deliberate or accidental, it is a serious concern in both your college and professional careers.

Plagiarism can happen in a number of ways:

• Turning in a project written entirely or partially by someone else
• Using slightly different words to rewrite an author’s sentence (paraphrasing) without giving credit to the original source (citation)
• Copying and pasting text from an online source without properly identifying it
• Submitting work you did from another class or assignment as original work (self-plagiarism)
• Using partial or out of context quotations in order to change the original meaning
• Including original or adapted media or charts/diagrams in your work without properly crediting them

Image credit: 2014 iParadigms LLC (Turnitin)

Think of the University as a factory. Writing and research are the work of the University and knowledge is the product. In order for research to move forward, it is necessary to read what others have already discovered and written before us. This is the scholarly tradition. We must give credit to original research and acknowledge the sources we have used in our writing.

Work at the University level, and at Walsh of course, is guided by ethical standards in all academic work including taking tests, writing research papers and publishing on the Web. Many students do not understand the extent of the rules for citing someone else’s work in the research process, and thus do not know when they are plagiarizing. However, it is your responsibility to learn and use appropriate research writing techniques.

A research paper should combine your ideas with the previous research of other scholars on the same topic. You can use another scholar’s words, facts and ideas, but this borrowed material must not be presented as your own creation. Your research paper should not merely be a review of publications with extracted quotations. You should be looking for sources that provide you with new information about your topic and that expand your ideas, provide negative and/or positive examples to help your argument and that lend authority to your viewpoint on the topic.

Adapted from the Information Literacy Tutorial by the University of Wisconsin System.  Information Literacy Tutorial by Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at guides.library.uwm.edu