When you use or refer to an article (or any other resource), be sure to properly attribute the source of your information. Instructors will inform students of the citation style needed for research papers in their subject area. Two commonly used style manuals are MLA (Modern Language Association) for English and the humanities, and APA (American Psychological Association) for social sciences. Although the formats differ in detail, their purpose is the same—to lead the reader to the source of the writer’s information. The key ingredients for a citation are the author’s name, the title of the article or book, the publishing information (book publisher or journal title), the date of publication, and page numbers.
For more information on how to format your paper and cite your sources in various formats, please refer to Lakeland Library's Writing and Citing Research Guide.
Plagiarism is the intentional or unintentional theft of someone else’s intellectual property (ideas). Intellectual property can be in the form of written or spoken words, music, film, websites, or inventions. When a student uses the ideas of others, and fails to credit the author, that constitutes plagiarism.
Intentional plagiarism is fairly obvious—turning in someone else’s paper as one’s own or cutting and pasting portions of someone else’s work into a paper without citing it is widely recognized as plagiarism.
Unintentional plagiarism occurs when students fail to differentiate between common knowledge and something that needs to be cited. That the earth revolves around the sun is common knowledge; Galileo does not have to be cited.
The bulk of a research paper should be the student’s work, as cited sources are only part of the whole. Instructors expect students to merge their own ideas with those of accepted authorities to create a new work.
Here are some reasons plagiarism might occur:
Here are some tips to help you avoid plagiarism:
No Citation Necessary
Common knowledge—if a fact or idea is well known, you do not need to cite a source unless you quote a source to establish that fact in your paper. For instance, citing would be necessary if you used a specific dictionary’s definition of a well-known word instead of defining it in your own terms.
Paraphrasing
Using your own words to summarize a source’s ideas shows you understand the idea and are blending it into your own work. However, even if you change the words and the sentence structure, you are still using the idea—cite the source.
Manage the Research Process
As defined by the U.S. Copyright Office:
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression. In copyright law, there are a lot of different types of works, including paintings, photographs, illustrations, musical compositions, sound recordings, computer programs, books, poems, blog posts, movies, architectural works, plays, and so much more!
The primary purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." Copyright protects expression, and never ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, or discoveries.
For additional information, see the U.S. Copyright Office's What Is Copyright?, or access one of the resources listed below.
As defined by the U.S. Copyright Office:
Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances.
Fair use determination involves four factors:
For additional information on fair use, see the U.S Copyright Office Fair Use Index, or access one of the resources listed below.
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