Avoiding Internet plagiarism

Understand what plagiarism is.

When you use another author’s intellectual property—language, visuals, or ideas—in your own writing without giving proper credit, you commit a kind of academic theft called plagiarism.

Treat Web sources in the same way you treat print sources.

Any language that you find on the Internet must be carefully cited, even if the material is in the public domain or is publicly accessible on free sites. When you use material from Web sites authored by federal, state, or municipal governments (.gov sites) and by nonprofit organizations (.org sites), you must acknowledge that material, too, as intellectual property owned by those agencies.

Keep track of which words come from sources and which are your own.

To prevent unintentional plagiarism when you copy passages from Web sources to an electronic file, put quotation marks around any text that you have inserted into your own work. In addition, during note taking and drafting, you might use a different color font or your word processor’s highlighting feature to indicate text taken from sources—so that source material stands out unmistakably as someone else’s writing.

Avoid Web sites that bill themselves as “research services” and sell essays.

When you use Web search engines to research a topic, you will often see links to sites that appear to offer legitimate writing support but that actually sell term papers. Of course, submitting a paper that you have purchased is cheating, but even using material from one counts as plagiarizing.

Go to related page: Taking notes without plagiarizing