Title: Writing Assignments
Course: Academic Integrity > Section: Pages You Can Show Students

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism can take on many different forms, which is part of what makes it so tricky to prevent. It's easy to understand that you need to cite direct quotes, but did you know that you can plagiarize yourself? What about paraphrasing? Does that need to be cited? (Yes!)

Taking credit for someone else's work is understandably a problem. Crediting others for their ideas and work through the use of source citations not only adds credibility to your own statements or provides you with counter arguments, they also show respect for that person's knowledge and research.

But what about self-plagiarism? If plagiarism is taking credit for someone else's work, how can you plagiarize yourself? In this case, it's not so much that you're stealing credit from yourself, but that you're misrepresenting when the work was created. As Laurie Stearns says in Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property and the Law, a "the misrepresentation is not of authorship but of the novelty of the work," (California Law Review, p. 32). Writing the same paper for two different classes, or using substantial parts lifted from one to another is a form of self-plagiarism.

Another common form of plagiarism is changing a few words around and assuming that the idea doesn't need attribution. Paraphrasing also requires attribution, because what you're doing is presenting the same idea, just in slightly different words. Bowdoin college refers to this as mosaic plagiarism.

Similarity Checkers

Many professors with written assignments are using similarity checkers such as Turnitin to verify that students aren't plagiarizing. When you submit a paper, that paper is then checked against a repository of other papers and websites, looking for the same words and concepts. It then assigns a score to the paper.

It's important to note that the similarity checker is not measuring how much you've been dishonest. Quotes, properly attributed, are an important part of a paper, and lend authority to your position. Instead, it's simply one tool that professors can use to encourage fair and honest work from every student.

One frustration that many students can encounter is that different disciplines require different citation styles and formats. If you are unsure how to cite properly, check with your professor, who should specify what format they require. Above, I cited the article, Copy Wrong: by Laurie Stearns. Here is an example of a citation. The point of the citation is that with that information, you should be able to track down and verify the quotation I used above.

Stearns, L. (1992). Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property and the Law. California Law Review, 80(2), 512. Retrieved from https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1114267?ln=en

You don't have to figure this out alone! The university wants you to succeed and has support resources in place to help when working on research papers. For example, check out these three links for writing help, research tutoring, and building citations.

- Citation Builder
- Contact the Writing Center
- Research tutoring