© 2002, Ashley McDowell

The following is a brief discussion of how to avoid violating it in the case of providing citations, but may not be comprehensive. For many great resources on citations, plagiarism, and academic integrity, see the links below.

If you draw material from sources, you must provide citations. Failing to provide citations constitutes plagiarism, which is cheating. This applies to material from articles, books, and the Internet. Your instructor will most likely recognize material that you did not write or come up with yourself. Do yourself a favor and don't take a chance, because the consequences will be quite severe when you are caught.

So that you know what exactly is involved in giving citations so you know how to avoid inadvertently cheating, here are some guidelines.

If you are taking information from a source, but not quoting directly from that source, you must still provide a citation. The biggest misconception about plagiarism is that it only involves the words you are using. Quotation marks and a citation are required if you are using the same words as someone else. A citation is required if you are using someone else's idea or information, no matter what words you use to express the idea or information.

If you are putting the person's ideas or information in your own words, it is not enough just to change a word here and there. You must really put it in your own words. Chances are, you don't need to say everything he or she has said anyway, so you can choose the most important points and sum them up. Then provide a citation.

A problem some people have with citations is knowing how frequently to provide a citation. If you're using a lot of information from one source, it's awkward to put a citation at the end of every sentence you've extracted from it (although you can just use the abbreviation ibid. for second and subsequent citations in a row from the same source). On the other hand, it's misleading and improper to put one citation at the end of a very long section, since that makes it look like you came up with everything but the last part. You must find a way to give credit where credit is due, and make it clear which material comes from the source. One way to do this is to say it in the text: you can begin a long paragraph of paraphrased information with a sentence that says (in some form), "According to So-and-so, ..." or "As Such-and-such has argued, ..." Then put a citation at the end of the paragraph. This makes it pretty clear that everything in between comes from So-and-so or Such-and-such.

You must give the sources of your information credit at the time when you provide that information, for each item of information that you got from another source. That means you can't have an endnote that makes a blanket statement about where you got the information and ideas in your paper, like "all my factual information comes from www.factualinform.com, and some of the arguments come from Descartes." You have to say for each piece of information or idea from whom you got it, and on what page (where applicable). Otherwise how is the reader to know which ideas are yours and which are someone else's?

There are a couple of circumstances when it is appropriate to put a source's name at the end of your paper, but not cite it within the text. The first is when you're crediting someone who has read or discussed your paper with you, but from whom you didn't take any particular idea. For these, you just say in a footnote or endnote that you want to thank that person for reading your draft, or for discussing the topic with you, or for making comments on your paper. The second circumstance is when you read something and think it might have affected the way you think about the issue, but you haven't used any particular piece of information or idea from it that you can point out. For these, just put the source information in your bibliography (this is why it's more professional to have a bibliography than a "works cited" page).

Instructors can't be as worried about any of this when the idea or information comes from class notes. Unless your instructor says otherwise, don't bother to give citations from class notes, except in the following two circumstances. First, if you quote directly from class notes (which you probably shouldn't do much if at all anyway), then you must provide a citation. Second, if material that you are taking from class notes was a presentation of an author's argument, you should go to that original material and find the argument to cite from the original source.

There are many resources about the mechanics of citations and about what plagiarism is, why it's wrong, and how to avoid it. Below find a small sampling of some web pages that are interesting and useful. By the way, if you do an Internet search of your own about plagiarism, you'll find that there are many, many resources out there for detecting it.

http://www.spaceless.com/WWWVL/ - a list of links about how to cite electronic sources

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue7/kairos/ - "Creating Models for Electronic Citations"

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.html - Columbia Guide to Online Style

http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/wts/plagiarism.html - "Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It"

http://www.hamilton.edu/academic/Resource/WC/AvoidingPlagiarism.html - this is a great source with actual examples to help you understand the difference between plagiarizing and not plagiarizing

http://sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm - avoiding plagiarism and what makes it wrong, with examples

http://www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagexam.html - examples of the types of plagiarism

http://www.writing.northwestern.edu/tips/plag.html - avoiding plagiarism

http://quarles.unbc.edu/lsc/rpplagia.html - 11 tips to help avoid plagiarizing

http://www.ehhs.cmich.edu/~mspears/plagiarism.html - plagiarism Q&A, including how to cite sources

http://www.northwestern.edu/uacc/plagiar.html - a good site on citations and plagiarism with LOTS of examples

http://www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagiarism.html - a really down-to-earth, easy-to-read discussion of plagiarism and what's wrong with it, and how to provide citations - highly recommended.

Writing resources (these may or may not be particularly helpful for citations, but they're a good resource anyway):

http://www.welch.jhu.edu/publish/guides.html - all kinds of writing guides, online resources for writers, style guides, etc.

http://www.ipl.org/ref/RR/static/ref73.00.00.html - Internet Public Library Style & Writing Guide Resources

http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/ - "Guide to Grammar and Style" by Jack Lynch - a comprehensive alphabetical guide, from apostrophes to who/whom, with everything in between.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ - "OWL" writing resources, links, tutorials, lab - tons of help with writing, including information on research and documenting sources.

In addition to web sites, you can look in style guides such as the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing, Words Into Type, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing), and The Chicago Manual of Style (the undergraduate lending library at the UofA Department of Philosophy has a copy of the Chicago Manual that you'd be welcome to look at). These are just some of many fine resources about writing papers.