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 the same way you treat print sources. Any language that you find on the web must be cited, even if the material is in the public domain (which generally includes older works no longer protected by copyright law) or is publicly accessible on free sites. When you use material from websites sponsored by federal, state, or municipal governments (.gov sites) or 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 and paste passages from web sources to an electronic file, put quotation marks around any text that you have inserted into your own work. During note taking and drafting, you might use a different color font or highlighting to draw attention to text taken from sources—so that material from articles, websites, and other sources stands out unmistakably as someone else’s words.

Avoid websites 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 college essays. Of course, submitting a paper that you have purchased is cheating, but even using material from such a paper is considered plagiarism.

Integrating and citing sources to avoid plagiarism

Recognizing intellectual property