What Counts as Plagiarism?

We typically think of plagiarism as cheating. Plagiarism, however, often occurs because the process of citation can be confusing, technology makes copy + paste so easy, and knowing exactly what to cite is not always easy! You can avoid plagiarism by learning how to cite material and keeping track of sources in your notes. Give yourself plenty of time to process sources so you don’t plagiarize by mistake. Here are some examples of plagiarism:

• Submitting a paper written by someone else.
• Using words and phrases from the source text and patching them together in new sentences.
• Failing to acknowledge the sources of words or information.
• Not providing quotation marks around a direct quotation. This leads to the false assumption that the words are your own.
• Borrowing the idea or opinion of someone else without giving the person credit
• Restating or paraphrasing a passage without citing the original author
• Borrowing facts or statistics that are not common knowledge without proper acknowledgment

Figure 1. The plagiarism spectrum. There are many different ways to plagiarize. It is your responsibility to know what constitutes plagiarism so you can avoid it in your assignments.

Figure 2. More ways to plagiarize.

Why Should You Care?

Being honest and maintaining integrity in your academic work is a sign of character and professionalism. In addition to maximizing your own learning and taking ownership of your academic success, not plagiarizing is important because

• Your professors assign research projects to help you learn. You cheat yourself when you substitute someone else’s work for your own.
• You don’t like it when someone else takes credit for your ideas, so don’t do it to someone else.
• Plagiarizing comes with consequences. Depending on the offense and the institution, you may be asked to rewrite plagiarized work, receive a failing grade on the assignment, fail the entire course, or be suspended from the university.
• Professors use search engines, databases, and specialized software to check suspicious work, so you will eventually get caught.

Citing Common Knowledge and Facts

If you cite information that is common knowledge or a fact, you do not need to cite that information. Everyone would agree that the Civil War started in 1861. You don’t need a citation for that information, even if you didn’t know when the Civil War started until you looked it up! Be careful, however—if there is any controversy or complexity to the information you get from elsewhere, you want to include a source. So, for example, if you are discussing the causes of the Civil War, you probably want to cite your sources, since historians might disagree about the various causes.

Think about it this way. A reader might challenge you about something in your paper, and in that case, you want a source. No reader is going to challenge you about when the Civil War began. That’s a fact—so you don’t need a source. But if you claim that the Civil War was a conflict over federalism versus states’ rights, a reader might disagree and cite instead the centrality of slavery as a cause for the war. In this case, you would want to be able to offer your source—the expert whose opinion about the cause of the Civil War you have cited. Your reader’s argument, then, is with that source and not with you.