Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism: Avoiding Plagiarism

Once you understand the definition of plagiarism and can recognize the forms it can take, it becomes much easier to avoid. Academic writing pretty much requires the adoption and reproduction of other’s ideas and words. Without doing so, it would be difficult to enter into conversations in our fields, and help readers understand the importance and purpose of our own research. Most research articles have a “literature review” section where you are expected to cite and quote from sources to help establish the context of your research. So, there’s no reason to avoid adopting and reproducing other’s ideas and expressions. What you do want to avoid is failing to acknowledge the sources of these ideas and expressions.

While proper citation is the most important method for avoiding plagiarism (and is the focus of the next section of this module), this will be easier to do if you follow some simple guidelines:

• Start assignments early, giving you enough time to ask questions of your instructor as to how to cite or integrate information from the sources you find.
   
• Keep good notes on your sources that you can use to easily identify the source of a quotation and build your references entry. If you have a great quotation but can’t remember where it came from, you may be tempted to include it without quotation marks, thereby committing academic dishonesty.
   
• As you draft your paper, make sure to always put expressions taken from sources in quotation marks, and always add lead-ins to paraphrases as you write (like "According to . . ."). Don’t assume you’ll remember what ideas or quotations came from where when you return to your draft later.
   
• Review your paper to make sure every quotation in the paper has a corresponding entry in the References, and that every new idea or piece of data introduced has a clear source.