The principle of academic integrity in intellectual work allows you to trust the sources you use and to demonstrate that your own work is equally trustworthy. Plagiarism, whether careless or deliberate, damages your ethos and academic integrity. Whether intentional or not, plagiarism can bring serious consequences. At some colleges, students who plagiarize fail the course automatically; at others, they are expelled. Academics who plagiarize, even inadvertently, have had their degrees revoked and their books withdrawn from publication. And outside academic life, eminent political, business, and scientific leaders have been stripped of candidacies, positions, and awards because of plagiarism.

Avoiding inaccurate or incomplete citation of sources

If your paraphrase is too close to the original wording or sentence structure of the source (even if you identify the source); if you do not identify the source of a quotation (even if you include the quotation marks); or if you fail to indicate clearly the source of an idea that you obviously did not come up with on your own, you may be accused of plagiarism even if your intent was not to plagiarize. Inaccurate or incomplete acknowledgment of sources often results either from carelessness or from not learning how to borrow material properly in the first place.

Academic integrity calls for you to be faithful not only to the letter of the material you are drawing on but also to its spirit: you need to honor the intention of the original source. For example, if your source says that an event may have happened in a particular way, then it isn’t ethical to suggest that the source says that the event absolutely happened that way.

As a writer of academic integrity, you will want to take responsibility for your research and for acknowledging all sources accurately. One easy way to keep track is to keep photocopies, printouts, or unaltered digital copies of every source as you conduct your research; then you can identify needed quotations by highlighting or flagging them on each source.

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Avoiding deliberate plagiarism

Deliberate plagiarism—handing in a project written by a friend or purchased (or simply downloaded) from an essay-writing company; cutting and pasting passages directly from source materials without marking them with quotation marks and acknowledging your sources; failing to credit the source of an idea or concept in your text—is what most people think of when they hear the word plagiarism. This form of plagiarism is particularly troubling because it represents dishonesty and deception: those who intentionally plagiarize present the hard thinking and hard work of someone else as their own, and they deceive readers by claiming knowledge they don’t really have.

Deliberate plagiarism is also fairly simple to spot: your instructor will be well acquainted with your writing and likely to notice any sudden shifts in the style or quality of your work. In addition, by typing a few words from a piece of student writing into a search engine such as Google, your instructor can identify “matches” very easily.

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For Multilingual Writers: Plagiarism as a cultural concept