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Plagiarism

I hope you all have already heard of this thing called Plagiarism. As a student, you get constantly reminded that you should not plagiarise.

Of course, we know we should not copy word for word other people’s work or pay someone to write our report.

But that’s not all of it.

Surprised?

Even when you rephrase the source if you do not credit them you still are plagiarising. Oh, and did you know that you can self-plagiarise? Re-using stuff from your previous report still counts as cheating.

Today’s universities use various software to check your work which makes it scarier and we need to be more careful in our work.  Why do you ask? Because unintentional and self-plagiarism for most institutions are penalized the same way as intentional ones. 

We are here for the rescue.

There is a simple rule to follow when it comes to giving credit and when to use it. 

You probably have already heard about reference lists. That is the list of all the sources you used in your paper. What most people forget is to credit in text properly.

So no matter if you are using an excerpt or rephrasing something you have read you need to put right after or specify right before who said it. Here are some examples:

It was found that pelicans migrate to the south each year between December and January (Peters, 2010).

In the study of Peters (2010), it was found that pelicans migrate to the south each year between December and January.

The “cistation” (Peters, 2010 ) of the pelicans is considered now a normal process that most birds go through.

As you can see from the examples, you can add it at the end of the sentence, within the sentence and after a quote.

It might look sometimes that you have too many of these ugly interrupters in your paper but as the saying goes always better to be safe than sorry.

If you want to know more about academic writing stay tuned!