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Plagiarism
Contents
- What is plagiarism
- Penalties
- Appropriate use of sources
- How to avoid plagiarism
- Advice from the University's Information Services
What is plagiarism
Plagiarism means appropriating the ideas and/or words of somebody else and passing them off as your own. Plagiarism most often takes the form of using phrases, sentences or paragraphs from articles, books or the internet and citing them in dissertations, essays, seminar presentations or other forms of assessed work without proper acknowledgement. It is equally unacceptable to take material from the work of other students and to pass it off as one's own, whether or not the material is copyrighted.
Penalties
The following regulations apply to all coursework, including dissertations.
It is the normal practice of the Department to award a mark of zero to work which is proven to be plagiarised and to withhold credit points for the unit in the case of essays. This does not preclude the imposition of more severe sanctions, which are outlined in Section 4 of the Examination Regulations. The most severe sanction is the withholding of the award of a degree. It is not necessary for the Department, or the University, to prove that a student introduced plagiarised material with the intent to deceive, merely to prove that the plagiarism occurred.
Appropriate use of sources is not plagiarism
In many cases, the use of the ideas of others is entirely appropriate in academic work. You will often need to cite the arguments of particular authorities, perhaps to justify your point of view, or argue against the ideas of a particular writer. Academic writing is centrally concerned with assessing, commenting on and challenging the competing arguments of different people and you should learn to feel confident in citing the work of others. But you must never, through laziness, lack of time or any other cause, quote from the work of other people without acknowledging that you have done so.
How to avoid plagiarism
Much inadvertent plagiarism comes through sloppy note-taking. When you make notes from particular texts, record the name of the author and the title of the source on the top of the page on which you are making notes. Record the page number relating to any notes that you make and, if you are copying phrases, sentences, or longer sections verbatim, put these in quotation marks to ensure that you do not later come to think that they are a paraphrase of material from your source, or an idea of your own. Even if you make a paraphrase of material from your source, you should note the precise page number(s) of the material, since it is as wrong to appropriate ideas as it is to steal someone else's actual words.
There are a variety of proper ways to acknowledge that you are dealing with material that is not your own.
If, for example, you are writing an essay about the depiction of suburban scenes by the Impressionists, you might want to refer to particular definitions of the suburban. These vary considerably and you might want to mention those put forward by the art historian T.J. Clark. You could appropriately refer to his views in the following ways:
- You could write something like this: 'There is much merit in the view put forward by T.J. Clark, in his book The Painter of Modern Life, that the suburban was constructed as the opposite of the urban.'
- You could equally quote directly: 'To use the word "suburban" to describe those stomping grounds . . . was on the whole misleading, and remains so. It makes such places out to be the subordinates of the city, whereas in fact they were areas in which the opposite of the urban was being constructed'. In this case, you would follow the quotation with a footnote (see the section in essay writing on footnotes).
You must not introduce this argument without reference to Clark, or to use his words without acknowledgement that they are his.
You should also note that citing a particular work in your bibliography does not give you carte blanche to use its ideas, or to quote from it, indiscriminately. When you use passages from a particular source, or ideas that are specific to a particular author, you must refer to that source.
Material from the Internet should be treated in the same way as that from book and articles. You should also give a clear reference to your particular source. For advice on this see the information on internet resources in the bibliography section of essay writing.
All coursework and assessed work such as the Dissertation requires you to submit that work, with a cover sheet, which includes a declaration that attests that your work is your own and does not contain any plagiarised material. Think before you sign!