Giving Credit
Proper acknowledgment of sources is crucial in academic writing. Check out danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s extensive references for an example of how to do it right.
The basic principles for documenting materials are relatively simple. Give credit to all source materials you borrow by following these three steps: (1) placing quotation marks around any words you quote directly, (2) citing your sources according to the documentation style you’re using, and (3) identifying all the sources you have cited in a list of references or works cited. Materials to be cited in an academic argument include all of the following:
direct quotations
facts that are not widely known
arguable statements
judgments, opinions, and claims that have been made by others
images, statistics, charts, tables, graphs, or other illustrations that appear in any source
collaboration — that is, the help provided by friends, colleagues, instructors, supervisors, or others
However, three important types of evidence or source material do not need to be acknowledged or documented. They are the following:
Common knowledge, which is a specific piece of information most readers in your intended audience will know (that Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election, for instance)
Facts available from a wide variety of sources (that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, for example). If, for instance, you search for a piece of information and find the same information on hundreds of different reputable Web sites, you can be pretty sure it is common knowledge.
Your own findings from field research (observations, interviews, experiments, or surveys you have conducted), which should be clearly presented as your own
For the actual forms to use when documenting sources, see Chapter 22.
Of course, the devil is in the details. For instance, you may be accused of plagiarism in situations like the following:
if you don’t indicate clearly the source of an idea you obviously didn’t come up with on your own
if you use a paraphrase that’s too close to the original wording or sentence structure of your source material (even if you cite the source)
if you leave out the parenthetical in-text reference for a quotation (even if you include the quotation marks themselves)
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And the accusation can be made even if you didn’t intend to plagiarize.
But what about all the sampling and mashups you see all the time online and in popular culture? And don’t some artistic and scholarly works come close to being “mashups”? Yes and no. It’s certainly fair to say, for example, that Shakespeare’s plays “mash up” a lot of material from Holinshed’s Chronicles, which he used without acknowledgment. But it’s also true that Shakespeare’s works are “transformative” — that is, they are made new by Shakespeare’s art. Current copyright law protects such works that qualify as transformative and exempts them from copyright violations. But the issues swirling around the debate over sampling, mashups, and other uses of prior materials are far from clear, and far from over. Perhaps Jeff Shaw (in a posting that asks, “Is Mashup Music Protected by Fair Use?”) sums up the current situation best:
Lest we forget, the purpose of copyright law is to help content creators and to enhance creative expression. Fair use is an important step toward those ends, and further legislative work could solidify the step forward that fair use represents.
— Jeff Shaw, “Is Mashup Music Protected by Fair Use?”