What is Plagiarism?

Does it surprise you to know that at one time or another all of us probably wittingly or unwittingly have been guilty of stealing? It might have been in high school when you were writing a term paper and you crossed the line from research to plagiarism. Or, more recently, you might have taken credit for another person's words without using quotations or references.

In both academic and non-academic communities, ideas are intellectual property, traditionally protected by patents and copyrights. To use these ideas, permission for use runs the gamut from a license to a footnote to an entry in a bibliography. How an idea is to be used determines the nature of permission you must seek.

Ways in which another person's ideas can be used and formats in which they are expressed vary widely among disciplines. For example, some disciplines tend to paraphrase rather than quote directly the ideas being used especially when they appear in journal articles; on the other hand, other disciplines tend to quote directly even in journal articles. To complicate matters, a discipline that tends to paraphrase in journal articles may quote directly in longer works such as books or monographs.

Many times students aren't even aware that what they're doing constitutes plagiarism. So, let's look at what the University of Michigan considers plagiarism. The U of M Integrity Policy describes plagiarism as: "taking credit for someone else's work and ideas, stealing others' results or methods, copying the writing of others without acknowledgment, or otherwise taking credit falsely." Here are the specific types of plagiarism (from the same report):

• taking credit for words - the verbatim use of the words and phrases used by another without using quotation marks, block quotations, or otherwise giving reference to the source of the words.

• taking credit for work - presenting as one's own, information or other written material prepared by others, that requires significant intellectual effort and that does not give due credit to the individual(s) who created the written work in question; e.g., reporting a bibliography or summaries of articles prepared by someone else as one's own, without giving proper credit.

• taking credit for interpretive ideas - presenting interpretations as one's own, without giving proper credit to the individual(s) who originated the interpretations; e.g., reporting literature reviews or discussions of the stage of scholarship in a field described by someone else, without giving proper credit.

• taking credit for original ideas - reporting the original intellectual findings and discoveries of someone else, without giving proper credit.

  Proper credit means giving references to the reader to clearly identify the exact source of the words, work, interpretive ideas and/or original ideas in question.

Though your instructors should provide you with information about the norms and conventions they expect you to follow, it's your responsibility to make sure that you understand and meet all course requirements for crediting use of other people's intellectual property. As you write a paper and a doubt arises, refer to the list above. If you're still not sure that you are properly crediting someone else's work, consult the instructor in the course.