Lake Land College's Academic Integrity Code is available on the college website--read it for current information about academic dishonesty, cheating, plagiarism, fabrication, unauthorized collaboration, facilitating academic dishonesty, and the discipline procedures. Students can get into serious trouble by copying a paper right off the web, using a paper that they bought from someone else, citing sources incorrectly, or claiming ignorance about plagiarism and citing. Read the code and read all the information about MLA style.
Plagiarism is when you steal or pass off someone else's ideas as your own or use someone else's work without crediting the source.
Examples of plagiarism
If you do any of the following, you are guilty of plagiarism:
Plagiarism can be intentional or unintentional. Sometimes, people simply forget to cite a source. This can be easy to do, particularly if you're writing a paper with dozens of different sources. For example, you might want to use a quote or piece of information, but your forgot where you read it. But whether you knowingly copy another's work and claim it as your own, or whether it's due to ignorance or careless notetaking, plagiarism is a very serious offense in the academic world.
There are two ways to present someone else's ideas. You can either quote them by using their words exactly as they used them, or you can paraphrase, which is to explain their idea in your own words.
For example, let's say you read the following sentence in an article written by Fred Itchypitts in the July 2004 edition of Rock & Roll Journal:
The Beatles' lyrics weave love and walruses into a tapestry of peace and groovitude.
In an APA-style paper, you could write the following sentences:
Quote: Itchypitts (2004) says, "The Beatles' lyrics weave love and walruses into a tapestry of peace and groovitude."
Paraphrase: Itchypitts (2004) points to the connection between love and walruses in Beatles songs as an indication of their feelings of peace and well-being.
Plagiarism: One can sense a certain tapestry of groovitude that comes about by listening to the interplay between love and walruses in Beatles' lyrics. [No citation or mention of where this idea came from.]
With direct quotes, it's pretty obvious when there's plagiarism. In the overwhelming majority of cases, it would be too much of a coincidence if you thought of the exact same words in the exact same order as someone else. With paraphrasing, however, it can get tricky. See the following examples of How to Recognize Unacceptable and Acceptable Paraphrases.
It's not plagiarism if you have the following in your paper:
Aside from plagiarism, there are legal aspects to using someone else's work. This falls under copyright law.
Copyright protects the work of authors, composers, and artists. The United States Copyright Act of 1976 allows the creator or author of a work (book, article, music, art) the exclusive right to control the following:
What this means is that you're not allowed to make copies of copyrighted things (and/or distrubute them) without getting permission from the copyright holder. Sometimes this is the author (or creator in the case of music or art), but often it is the publisher. This ensures that authors, artists and musicians get the financial rewards and the credit for things they've created. It prevents theft of their work. There are, however, exceptions to copyright.
Fair use is a part of copyright law that allows certain exemptions. For example, if I'm a teacher using a book for educational purposes, I can make copies of small parts of it and distribute it to my class. However, I couldn't copy the whole book and sell it for profit, regardless of the purpose. Fair use is what allows you, as a student, to copy an article out of a journal without being sued by the journal's publisher.
Public domain means a work may be used for free without asking for permission or paying any royalties. This might be things that are very old and/or the copyright has expired, such as Shakespeare's plays, for example. Or it might be something that was never copyrighted, such as government publications.
There is a difference between copyright and plagiarism. Even if you have permission to copy a work, you still need to properly cite it. This includes works in the public domain or a friend’s paper. Plagiarism is using any words or ideas without giving credit to the source. When a person copies material that is also copyrighted the crime is doubled. Not only has that person plagiarized, but they have also violated copyright laws.