What is Plagiarism?

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Video Contents

ideo Contents:

• What is plagiarism?
• What sorts of things must be cited?
• Why is it important to credit your sources?
• Tips for avoiding unintentional plagiarism

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Plagiarism is "the action or practice of taking someone else’s work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one’s own".
(Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. "plagiarism")

Plagiarism is academic misconduct and subject to penalties ranging from a letter of reprimand to expulsion as outlined in Policy 71 -- Student Discipline.

If your work includes someone else's work or ideas, then you must give credit to that individual by providing a citation.

Citation Examples
A citation is required for any of the various ways that you may be using someone else's work, whether you are quoting or paraphrasing words, summarizing, referring to, or building upon another's ideas or reasoning, or using the products of someone else's work.

Cite sources from all media, including print, electronic, broadcast, and verbal.

Grad Studies and citations

Provide accurate documentation of source material.

Avoid unintentional plagiarism.

• submit content more than once only with approval
• accept only limited editorial assistance
• take notes effectively and cite accurately
• be alert to the risk of unconscious plagiarism

Examples of Plagiarism

Examples of Plagiarism*

• John Black is an MA student, enrolled as a co-op student. He includes information obtained from a variety of internet sources in his work term report, but does not include these sources in his bibliography. However, he never quotes directly from these sources.
  Even though not quoting verbatim, John must give credit to the source of the information he is using. Information found in electronic sources, including the Internet, as well as print and oral sources, must be credited.
• Mary Jones is a doctoral candidate, preparing a major research paper as part of her comprehensive examinations. The research topic is closely linked to the work she carried out as a masters student, and she includes sections of the MA thesis in the paper. She does not seek permission from her MA and PhD supervisors. She does not cite her MA thesis in the bibliography.
  Submit content more than once only with approval and acknowledgement
• Marta Ibis is a graduate student in an MA (thesis option) program. She completes her thesis and submits it for formal examination. One of the readers discovers that major sections of the thesis have been copied from internet sources. These sources are not acknowledged anywhere in the thesis.
  Passages of copied text are verbatim quotations and the author must be cited, even when the information is posted on the Internet

* Thank you to Dr. Bruce Muirhead, Associate Dean of Arts, for these examples, taken from the Faculty of Arts Academic Integrity Workshop, September 2008.

note-taking tips and formatting requirements

Tips and Best Practices

Consult a writers' handbook to obtain writing advice and academic integrity guidelines.

Take detailed notes throughout your research process. Identify all quotations, paraphrases, and summaries in your notes and distinguish these from your own original work. Keep track of the bibliographic information for your source material as you discover it.

Use a Web-based bibliographic management program such as RefWorks to organize your references in folders. Export records from databases to your folders. RefWorks will automatically produce a bibliography of your references, formatted according to your style of choice.

Refer to a style guide that is an accepted standard for your discipline. A style guide will specify formatting requirements for citations and bibliographies.

Office of Academic Integrity
University of Waterloo
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Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
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