How to Avoid Plagiarism (By Really Trying)

...........Most students know that it is plagiarism if you deliberately use someone else’s work and try to pass it off as your own without giving credit to the true author. However, many instances of plagiarism are unintentional. Unintentional plagiarism is still plagiarism, however. It is important that you learn to write in ways that will help you to avoid this pitfall. Here are some guidelines that will help you:

  1. Whenever you use another author’s ideas or information, you need to give credit to that author by acknowledging the source of the information. In some systems, you would do this by footnoting the information. Using the American Psychological Association (APA) guidelines, we do this by inserting an "in-text" citation, including the authors’ names and the year of publication. Example:

    2.  
      ..... Pseudopatients reported that staff spent little time interacting with them (Rosenhan, 1973).
         
  2. If you use an author’s exact words, you need to use quotation marks to denote the beginning and end of the quotation, and in your in-text citation you need to also include the page number of the quoted material. Example:

    3.  
      Some advocates of the sociocultural perspective have asked the question: "If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?" (Rosenhan, 1973, p. 250).
         
  3. In order to avoid plagiarism, ideas and information taken from another source that you cite must still be presented in your own style, your own words, and your own order. This involves more than simply rearranging words in the original author’s sentences. The best tactic is to try to digest and understand what the author said, then write it down in your own words without looking at the author’s words again. Warning: if you do this sentence by sentence, you may still end up plagiarizing. If you write a paragraph (or a whole paper) where you simply paraphrase someone else’s ideas sentence by sentence, you are plagiarizing the format in which they presented their ideas. Again, to avoid this, you need to understand and digest their ideas, then resynthesize the information and present it in your own way. For many writers, it is tempting to use the words of the original author because they seem more eloquent. Don’t fall into this trap. Your job as the writer is to come up with your own way of presenting the material.

    4.  
  4. Ordinarily, no more than 10% of your paper (and preferably much less) should consist of direct quotes. The rest should be your own words.
      5.  
  5. Sources of all information used in your text should be documented with in-text citations (as explained in steps 1 and 2). All sources cited in your text should also be cited at the end of your paper, in the reference section. References that you consulted but did not cite (which means that you did not use any information from these sources) do not get included in the reference list. All sources cited in the text should be included in the reference list and all sources included in the reference list should be cited somewhere in the text.
There is one exception to the above rule. If the author of an article cites information obtained in someone else’s work, and you also want to cite that work in your own writing, you should use indicated the name and date of the original work, followed by cited in and give the name and date citation of the work you read. Example:
  Despite the ease with which some people believe they can distinguish "normal" from "abnormal," the rules for making such distinctions are not universal (Benedict, 1934; cited in Rosenhan, 1973).   In the case above, only the Rosenhan article is included in the reference section. Readers wanting to track down the original source can get the information from the Rosenhan article. If possible, you should do this yourself, then you can read the article, verify the information, and cite it directly, based on your own reading of the material.
  This page is copyrighted. Students are welcome to print copies of this page for their own personal use. Further reproduction of the contents of this page is prohibited without the express permission of the author. You are, however, welcome to use links to direct students to this page.

The author of this page is Barbara L. Brown, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Georgia Perimeter College. You may e-mail me at bbrown@gpc.edu.

This page was last modified on March 26, 1999.