“Plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s ideas, words, or thoughts as your own without giving credit to the other person. When you give credit to the original author (by giving the person’s name, name of the article, and where it was posted or printed), you are citing the source. Plagiarism is when you do not include this information in your paper. There are other forms of plagiarism, as well, such as reusing a paper and having someone else write for you.”¹⁾

These are all examples of plagiarism:

• Poor paraphrasing
  • “Paraphrasing or summarizing that fails to acknowledge or give attribution to the original source
  • Rewriting of the original text without acknowledgment of the source material”²⁾

• Cut-and-Paste
• Copy-and-Paste (i.e. transcribing)
• “copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not”³⁾
• “Buying a paper online or downloading a paper from a free site.
• Copying or using work done by another student.”⁴⁾

• “failing to put a quotation in quotation marks”⁵⁾ —“even if you do cite it” ⁶⁾
• “Quoting … material⁷⁾ without citing the source of that material. …
• Citing sources you didn’t use”⁸⁾
• “Citing a source in the body of a paper, but not including it in the list of references
• Including sources in the references that are not cited in the text”⁹⁾ (Note: if you consulted a source but did not use it in your paper and want to mention it anyway, split the list of your sources to a “references” or “works cited” and a “bibliography.” The work you did not cite in the body of the text must go in the bibliography list.)

• Do not copy/paste. It is rarely a good idea. Unless the sentences you are copy/pasting have a special significance. Copy/pasting the works of others can potentially get you in trouble.

• Do not make a collage out of others’ works. You are not an aggregator. Many of your assignments aren’t there to see if you can find others’ works, copy them, paste them into your paper, and then cite them. That will get you a failed mark. Your assignments, even if they are already answered on the Internet, must reflect your own thinking.

• Do not use more than 10% quotes from any source (direct quotes or paraphrased) if you are unsure. Stick to this rule unless you are instructed, explicitly, by your professor to do otherwise.

In most cases, yes you do. If you are not sure, then see this flowchart.

Read the following articles to understand what paraphrasing is and IS NOT:

• How to Use a Writing Cleanroom to Avoid Plagiarism
• How to ACTUALLY Avoid Plagiarism
• Why You Can’t Make Someone Else’s Words Your Own

• Avoiding Plagiarism - (a chapter in a book called Reading and Writing in College)

You can find chapters of an online book that explains the details of citation here

• Academic Honesty Lesson 1 - What is Plagiarism?

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• Academic Honesty Lesson 2 - How to Avoid Plagiarism

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• Academic Honesty Lesson 3 - Giving Credit to Sources

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More videos here

• Plagiarism: What it is and how to avoid it - a course on LinkedIn Learning, freely available via Toronto Public Libraries

• Why no definition of plagiarism is fully complete
• What Is Plagiarism? - Stanford University
• What Is Plagiarism? - Georgetown University
• How to Avoid Plagiarism - Northwestern University
• Plagiarism.org - an extensive, on-line resource on plagiarism
• Purdue Writing Lab, ‘Research and Citation Resources - Purdue Writing Lab’
• International Center for Academic Integrity
• Open Access Plagiarism and Academic Integrity Resources, an excellent list of resources on the topic, (also archived here)

Play the game of Academic Integrity in Space to learn more about the details of academic integrity and to see if you can win the game.