Q & A: PLAGIARISM AND HOW TO AVOID IT What is plagiarism? The University’s regulations define plagiarism as: 'the reproduction or paraphrasing, without acknowledgement, from public or private (i.e. unpublished) material attributable to, or which is the intellectual property of another, including the work of students'. Plagiarism is intellectual theft: it involves using someone else’s work and (intentionally or inadvertently) passing it off as your own. In an academic environment, this is considered a serious offense. Penalties for plagiarism can be severe, and range from loss of marks for a particular assignment, right through to termination of course for the worst cases. What counts as plagiarism? Some types of plagiarism are fairly obvious: buying a paper off the internet, for example, or copying your flatmate’s assignment and turning it in as your own. Students are often unaware of other kinds of plagiarism, however. ANY use of material without acknowledgement counts as plagiarism, even if it involves only a few phrases or sentences rather than an entire assignment. The rules cover all material—images, graphs, statistics, music—and not just written texts. And they cover ideas as well as the exact words that are used to express them; many students realize that they need to acknowledge the sources of quotations, but don’t understand that they must use references to identify the sources of ideas and information as well. I don’t mean to cheat, but don’t know how the rules work in practice. What can I do to avoid plagiarism? A large majority of plagiarism offenses are committed by students who work hard and have no intent to deceive. Many have learned poor habits at school, or simply haven’t yet developed the academic skills they need for university-level work. The best way to avoid inadvertent plagiarism is to use footnotes or endnotes to identify your sources, whether internet sites, books, articles, scores, or anything else. This means you need to be absolutely rigorous about taking notes: ALWAYS write down all the publication details (including page numbers if relevant) of your sources; and use quotation marks (or a big letter Q) in your notes to remind yourself where you have copied something directly. When you write your assignment, mark off all quoted material with quote marks (or block indent the quotation if it is more than four lines long), and use a reference to identify the source. Follow the reference format of a standard style sheet (eg Trevor Herbert’s Music in Words). You also need references for any information you repeat from your sources that is not common knowledge. For example, you don’t need to footnote your source for Bach’s dates—you can find the information that he lived from 1685-1750 in a vast array of reference works. But if you say that the second version of his cantata Ein feste burg probably dates from between 1727-1731, you would need to footnote your source, since that information is less widely available. Finally, remember to use references to identify your sources for ideas, even if you paraphrase the source text and present the ideas in your own words. Further information If you are confused about what plagiarism is, or would like more advice about how to avoid it, see your personal tutor, or the course tutor if your query involves a particular assignment. There are also some useful websites that provide more detailed explanations and advice than can be offered here. Especially good ones are the University of Melbourne’s plagiarism advice for students page (http://www.services.unimelb.edu.au/plagiarism/advice.html) and the ‘plagiarism handout’ from Purdue University (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/print /research/r_plagiar.html). This sheet is designed to provide advice and support; it does not constitute a statement of policy.The University of Southampton’s plagiarism and cheating policy can be found online at: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~qahbk4/desapprev2-3-2-9.htm.