So What is Plagiarism Exactly?
Plagiarism is the use of other people’s words or ideas and presenting them as your own:
Copying plagiarism is when you Copy and paste word for word a sentence or paragraph into your paper without saying where you got that information.
Paraphrasing plagiarism is when you rewrite a sentence or paragraph in your own words without saying when you learned that information.
Global plagiarism is when you take someone else’s whole assignment and put your name on it. This includes getting someone else to write your assignment for you or using AI software to do your work for you.
How to Avoid Plagiarism
Your paper will consist of a mix of your ideas and ideas of others. You put the ideas of other people in your essay in one of two ways. By quoting, which means that you copy words from somebody else. Or by paraphrasing, which means you write their ideas in your own words.
Quoting
When you quote you are copying the exact words of the author you are reading. Put quote marks around the quote. Then write (or cite) the name of the author and page number of the source where you found the quote.
“Many exoplanets have been observed close to their parent stars with orbital periods of a few days” (Alexandre & Rodríguez, 2013, p. 1).
As a general rule, try to keep your quotations down to less than 5% of your paper.
Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is when you take a passage from a source and rewrite it in your own words. Follow the paraphrase with a citation that includes the author’s sir name and the year of publication.
Kangaroos can jump up to a remarkable height of 3 meters (Turner,2020).
You’ll be doing this most of the time when referring to other people’s ideas in your paper. A correct paraphrase shows your instructor that you understand the concept you are writing about.
Citing
As you have seen, a quote and a paraphrase require you to cite the author you took the information from.
Citing is no more than naming the author of the research you quoted or paraphrased.
Above we put the author's sir name and year of publishing in brackets after the quote and paraphrase.
Alternatively, we can introduce the author's name in the text and then write the date in brackets before the sentence.
According to Turner (2020), Kangaroos can jump up to a remarkable height of 3 meters.
Here I have introduced the Author with the words ‘According to’.
Reference Page
Finally, you finish your paper with your reference list, which goes at the end of your paper. Here you write the full details of all of the sources you used in your paper.
References are written slightly differently depending on if they are published in a journal, book, webpage, newspaper, or other source. Use a citation guide to help you write them correctly (available as a handout at the entrance of the library).
References
Turner, A. (2020). Kangaroo Acrobatics: How high can a kangaroo jump? Nature, 19, 25-48.