• Concerned about plagiarism?
• Want to know more about what needs to be cited?
• Tips for using your sources appropriately

Don't risk plagiarizing--or possible charges of plagiarism.

The better you understand what constitutes plagiarism, the better able you will be to avoid it.

According to Lewis & Clark's Academic Integrity Policy

Academic dishonesty with respect to written or other types of assignments includes but is not limited to: failure to acknowledge the ideas or words of another that have consciously been taken from a source, published or unpublished; placing one's name on papers, reports, or other documents that are the work of another individual, whether published or unpublished; flagrant misuse of the assistance provided by another in the process of completing academic work; submission of the same paper or project for separate courses without prior authorization by faculty members; fabrication or alteration of data; or knowingly facilitating the academic dishonesty of another.

Pathfinder 2000-2001 pp. 60-61

Obviously, you would be guilty of plagiarism if you put your name on a paper written by another person, or if you lead readers to believe that words, ideas, or other intellectual property belonging to another are your own.

More often than not, however, students fall into the trap of unconscious or unintentional plagiarism, either because they do not know how to properly handle and/or acknowledge material they take from their sources, or because they are simply sloppy. Instances of this type of plagiarism include:

• failure to put the words of another in quotation marks.
• "paraphrases" of the words of another that simply change a word or phrases here and there.
• failure to clearly acknowledge the source of certain ideas or material taken from another.
• failure to make clear the extent of one's dependence on a source or sources.
• failure to document sources adequately (usually a result of not choosing or not following an accepted style of documentation).

For more information on how you can avoid some of this instances of unintentional plagiarism, read on

or take a look at

Susan M. Hubbuch, Writing Research Papers across the Curriculum

Section 6: How to and How Not to Incorporate Your Evidence into Your Paper

Section 4: Reading Critically and Taking Notes

The short answer to this question is that you must always acknowledge sources that you have used or that have influenced your thinking.

THUS, you are expected to cite:

• direct quotations;
• studies, ideas, arguments, points of view of others, even though you summarize this material in your own words;
• sources of information, facts, and figures;
• authors you have read whose ideas are similar to yours, even though they reflect ideas you had before you read the work.

FURTHERMORE

• You should never cite a source that you yourself have not read. If one of your sources makes reference to a work that sounds promising to you, your obligation is to find and read this text yourself.
• The extent of your indebtedness to a source must always be clear. If, for example, one of your paragraphs reiterates factual information from a text you've read, you should introduce the paragraph something like this: "The major events of the strike are outlined by John Doe in A History of American Unions. "

FINALLY, you will also be expected to provide full bibliographic information about these sources in an accepted documentation style. To learn more, check out the Using and Citing Sources main page.

For more on the issue of what needs to be cited, read on.

There is a negative and a positive way to look at the issue of acknowledging sources in your paper.

Avoiding plagiarism is, of course, a good thing, but in a way it is, by itself, a negative incentive.

To take a positive approach to the matter requires us to reconsider the whole issue of the nature and function of research papers.

Some students, consciously or unconsciously, assume that in writing a research paper they are laying out some absolute truth, some fixed reality. "This is THE way it is."

But the experts and scholars who regularly write these sorts of papers don't see the situation this way at all.

Rather, they write as members of a group of people who have come together because of their common desire to make sense of, to comprehend, some part of the world in which they live.

The books and articles they write--the books and articles you have been reading--are in essence segments of a conversation these people are having among themselves in which they share with each other the sense they have made of some part of this intellectual puzzle. With a paper they are saying to their colleagues: "Here's the way it looks to me right now. What do you think?"

In constructing their individual points of view they are making use of the work of other members of the group--the ideas, theories, conclusions, facts and figures of their colleagues. Notice the word "constructing" here. They are not simply repeating what others have done and said. They are using this material as building blocks for their own point of view. Their papers are arguments: what gives them substance is a logical line of reasoning.

In the process of making this argument, these writers openly acknowledge the people who have provided these building blocks. They do so to give credit where credit is due. But they do so, in addition, because such acknowledgments strengthen their own arguments. In acknowledging their use of sources they are letting their colleagues know that they have read and studied the work of their colleagues. They are, in other words, showing that they have educated themselves about the topic. Moreover, they realize that acknowledging their sources makes their argument more credible because they are invoking the credibility that these sources already have with their readers.

When you write your own paper, this should be your general perception of what you are doing. Can you see how this general approach to research papers leads quite naturally to this type of prose?

Most specialists who have studied the transition to democracy in Outer Slobovia give some sort of credit to the activities of the Freedom Fighters. John Doe devotes only a few pages of his full-length study to this group, but he does note that they "played an important role" (45). In the view of Sally Smith, this guerrilla group was central to the attainment of a democratic government in this country. Specifically, she points to the group's repeated objective of winning "open and free elections" (Smith, 65; Valdez, chpt. 8). Yet the Freedom Fighters were not exactly political Boy Scouts. Their activities involved terrorist tactics in which thousands of innocent citizens lost their lives. . .

SO--how do you go about using your sources in this way? Here are some pointers.

#1

Put Your Sources Away When You Write the Initial Drafts of Your Paper

When you are ready to start formulating your point of view on the topic (which is going to be the argument of your paper), put all your sources aside and resist the urge to look at them until you feel as if you know what you think.

This simple strategy works for two reasons:

• Putting your sources aside as you are formulating your argument helps you avoid being pulled back into the specific arguments of others, which is the common cause of inadvertent plagiarism and excessive quoting;
• Putting your sources aside as you are formulating your argument forces you to assimilate the knowledge you've gained from your sources into a meaningful whole.

Once you are satisfied that you have a solid line of reasoning that reflects the sense you have made of your topic, you'll review your sources and notes, and in your draft you will:

• insert specific details, facts, and figures;
• attach authors' names to ideas and points of view you've summarized or referred to;
• use the words of others if and when they provide direct evidence for the point you want to make

# 2

Explicitly Name Authors and Sources in Your Text to Strengthen Your Argument

If you look closely at the analyses you've been reading, you'll note that most scholars go beyond minimum requirements of documenting their sources, and explicitly use the names of authors in their own sentences.

You'll want to follow their example because it strengthens your own argument.

• Explicitly naming sources lets your readers know that you've done your homework; you are showing that you are acquainted with the work of those considered experts on the topic.
• By using the names of authors in your text you are giving further credibility to your own argument by bringing to it the credibility these experts and their ideas already have with your readers.

There are any number of ways to accomplish this goal. If you look at the reading you've done, you'll find lots of other examples.

U.S. Census Bureau figures for 1990 indicate that. . .

According to well-known AIDS specialist Dr. Timothy Johnson, . . .

Most scholars in conflict resolution today build on the model developed in 1980 by Roy Rogers.

#3

Quote directly from your sources ONLY when the words of another provide evidence for a point you are making.

From everything that has been said up to this point, it should be obvious that, in general, you'll be summarizing the positions and ideas of others in your own words, introducing them as they fit into the argument you are building.

Can you see how this principle is working in these examples?

Contrary to popular belief, General Arnold did not order a massacre of the Apache. In a diary kept in the field, one of the soldiers in the 29th Cavalry recorded that Arnold explicitly told his men to "fire only when fired upon" (Charleton 54).

The sensuality of Kupplemeier's poetry is obvious in the imagery of "To My Beloved." On this spring day the winds are "as gentle as a lover's touch" and the cherry blossoms "swoon with desire" (lines 12, 14).

If, as Perry (1995) insists, the key to the syndrome is "involuntary muscular activity" (p. 78), then a number of children who have been studied have been misdiagnosed. Shultz and Hardy (1997), for example, point to behavior in the classroom that goes far beyond the operations of specific muscles.

In light of everything that's been said in this section, the following specific guidelines should make perfect sense.

• Quotations must always be incorporated into one of your sentences. To put it negatively, quotations should never constitute discrete sentences in your text.
  • AVOID:

    Merrill was a perfectionist. "He did so much revision his manuscripts are practically unreadable" (Keller, 87).

    WAYS TO DO IT:

    Merrill was a perfectionist. His editor John Keller has pointed out that "he did so much revision his manuscripts are practically unreadable" (87).

    Merrill was a perfectionist. According to his editor John Keller, "He did so much revision his manuscripts are practically unreadable" (87).

• You should quote only those words and phrases that are germane to your point. If the quotation introduces ideas or points of view that you do not follow up on, you are going to confuse your readers. NOTE: It goes without saying (but we'll say it anyway)--whatever form your quotation takes, you must NEVER, NEVER misrepresent the general idea, point of view, or intentions of the author.

If you are interested in learning more about ways to incorporate your sources into your text, see

Susan M. Hubbuch, Writing Research Papers across the Curriculum, Section 6.

Copies are available:

• on permanent reserve in the library
• in the Writing Center
• in the book store