Who Owns This Land: Land for the Freedmen? Project: O'Brien: Avoid Plagiarism

                                               A NOTE ON PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism is the act of using another person’s ideas or phrasing knowingly or through carelessness. This includes copying whole papers, paragraphs, sentences, statistics, lab results, artwork, musical lyrics, etc. without attributing the information to a source or person.

Quotation or Word-for-Word Plagiarism occurs when the researcher repeats the exact words of the source (verbatim) without using quotation marks and giving necessary credit to the author of the source. Paraphrasing and summarizing plagiarism occurs when the researcher restates the ideas of an original source without giving credit to the author or source of the information. This kind of plagiarism also occurs when a researcher uses an author’s key words or phrases without placing them in quotation marks.

The only exception to the above guidelines is when information is considered Common Knowledge. Common knowledge can be defined as information readers could easily find in general sources. A rule to follow when deciding whether
information you are finding is considered common knowledge is that you locate the same information in three well-respected sources.

Plagiarism occurs when:

• Copying from reference materials without adequate citation
• Purchasing a work written by another person
• Letting someone else write your paper
• Paraphrasing too closely to the original work
• Making up citations
• Submitting as your own someone else’s work either with or without permission
• “Cutting and pasting” part or all of an existing online source
• Having someone else--parent, sibling, friend, etc.--edit your essay to the extent of re-writing entire sentences or portions of it.

Ways to Avoid Plagiarism

• Identify resources used in your paper.
• Cite work when paraphrasing the ideas of others.
• Cite work when directly quoting the written work of an author.
• Learn the correct format for citing sources or where to find the format guidelines.
• Consult your teacher or librarian when you are unsure how to cite a source.