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. While there are many ways to damage your ethos and academic integrity, two that are especially important are the inaccurate or incomplete citation of sources—also called unintentional plagiarism—and plagiarism that is deliberately intended to pass off one writer’s work as another’s.

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 Academics who plagiarize, even inadvertently, have had their degrees revoked and their books withdrawn from publication.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.

Because the costs of even unintentional plagiarism can be severe, it’s important to understand how it can happen and how you can guard against it. In a January 2002 article published in Time magazine, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin explains how she made acknowledgment errors in one of her books. The book in question, nine hundred pages long and with thirty-five hundred footnotes, took Goodwin ten years to write. During this time, she says, she took most of her notes by hand, organized them, and later checked her sources to make sure all the material she was using was correctly cited. “Somehow in this process,” Goodwin goes on to say, “a few books were not fully rechecked,” and thus she omitted some acknowledgments and some quotation marks by mistake. Discovering such carelessness in her own work was very troubling to Goodwin since, as she puts it, “the writing of history is a rich process of building on the work of the past. . . . Through footnotes [and citations] you point the way to future historians.”

Goodwin certainly paid a steep price for her carelessness: she had to leave Harvard’s Board of Overseers and also resigned from the committee that awards Pulitzer Prizes. In addition, she was put on indefinite leave from a television program to which she had contributed regularly, was asked not to give a planned commencement address at the University of Delaware, and had to negotiate at least one settlement with a person whose work she had used without proper citation. Perhaps most seriously, this event called into question all of Goodwin’s work.

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 them on each source.

Avoiding deliberate plagiarism

Deliberate plagiarism—handing in an essay 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 an essay into a search engine such as Google, your instructor can identify “matches” very easily.

For Multilingual Writers: Plagiarism as a cultural concept