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Avoiding Plagiarism

A guide for assignments

written for Biology 100L

UMBC Department of Biological Sciences

Outline

Why we care.Why you should careWhat’s plagiarism?How to avoid plagiarismHow do I “give credit”?What NOT to citeCommon misconceptions and FAQ’s

Why we care.

Why do scholars care so much about citations?

Citations help us judge the reliability of a piece of information.

Citations help us find information that’s not indexed.

Not giving a scholar credit for his/her

work robs them of the recognition for their work that they have earned.

What’s the big deal about plagiarism?

A university is a community of academic or scholars. Like many professions, scholars have their own culture. A feature of human cultures is that they have sets of values that govern the way people conduct themselves.

Plagiarism violates the cultural norms of academia.

Why you should care

Plagiarism Penalties

Some of the penalties given to plagiarizing students in the past are:

Refusal to accept a paper until it is “plagiarism-free”, resulting in late penalties; AND/OR

Loss of credit for the assignment; AND/OR An additional plagiarism “penalty” of 5-30% off

the top of your end-of-semester grade, AND/OR A “Notice of Academic Misconduct” filed with the

Provost’s office or the UMBC Academic Conduct Committee, AND/OR

An automatic “F” in the course.

UMBC Rules

At UMBC, before arriving at a penalty for an incidence of plagiarism, instructors are required to consult with the Academic Conduct Committee to protect students against arbitrary and capricious grading. However, the university gives EACH INSTRUCTOR the freedom and the authority to make the final decision as to what they feel is an appropriate penalty.

For a complete explanation of UMBC policy, consult the UMBC Academic Handbook, or www.umbc.edu/integrity

Protect your reputation in this community As a member of UMBC’s academic community, you want your

professors to think well of you.

Besides making your interactions in class with them more pleasant, you also may be counting on them to say nice things about you in letters of recommendations for jobs, internships, or professional school.

Students who plagiarize are viewed as being unethical because they have violated one of the most fundamental cultural values of academia: respect for other peoples’ contributions. Faculty members who witness a student robbing another scholar of credit for their work think of those students as “immoral”. This impression will color all future interactions between professor and student, beyond what the student- who comes from another culture- may think is reasonable.

If you want to protect your reputation in this department, you should take great care to learn how to properly cite your sources.

What’s plagiarism?

Plagiarism. Incorporating someone else’s intellectual “work” into your own

writing without giving them credit.

What is “intellectual work”?

CREATIVE WRITINGIDEASINFORMATION or DATA

What is “intellectual work”?

CREATIVE WRITING- A particular choice or sequence of words to express an idea or fact.

Example: Three different ways to explain the symptoms of diabetes. “polydipsia, polyphagia, and polyuria. . .”(1) “extreme thirst, frequent urination [and] increased

appetite”(2) Are you hungry and thirsty a lot? Are you

inconvenienced by an “overactive bladder”? These are all signs that you might have diabetes.

What is “intellectual work”?

IDEAS- Interpretations of events, data or facts.

Example: Using an analogy of empty chairs to explain how

enzymes are affected by substrate concentration.

What is “intellectual work”?

INFORMATION- Facts, measurements or results of an experiment.

Example: The PKU gene is located on chromosome 12

[3].

Ways to plagiarize

The ones you probably know… Purchasing a paper from an internet paper-mill

site. Copying a paper written by another student. Copying sentences or phrases word-for-word

from books, encyclopedias, journal articles WITHOUT enclosing the words in quotation marks.

Ways to plagiarize

Also plagiarism . . . Presenting the information in another author’s

work in your own words (a.k.a. “paraphrasing”) without citing the source of the original information.

Reporting “facts” you just finished learning from reading a website without citing the website.

About 50% of Biology 100L students will do one of these on their first paper.

Summary

If it’s information, creative writing or ideas.AND you got it from another author You MUST cite the source

Avoiding Plagiarism

Avoiding plagiarism

Take careful notesSummarize in your own wordsMark other’s intellectual work with

quotation marks and/or in-text citations.Provide bibliographic information for your

sources in a reference list.

Note-taking

Avoiding plagiarism begins with good note-taking. As you take notes from your reading, be sure to keep track of where your information comes from. In your notes, you should mark which words are your own summaries (paraphrasing) of someone else’s information, which are your own ideas, and which are direct quotations.

Note-taking strategies

Before you begin to read a source, prepare a blank piece of paper for your notes. Head the paper with the complete bibliographic information you will need for your reference list.

Read the material once, from beginning to end, then turn the source over (or turn your monitor off) and write- in your own words- what you learned from the source that you didn’t know before. Leave space after each of your paraphrased statements.

Now go back and fill in the missing details (numbers, facts, etc.). If you must copy a phrase verbatim (word-for-word), put quotation marks around it.

Summary techniques [5]

Two ways to summarize information you’ve learned from somewhere else:

ParaphrasingNut shelling

Nut shelling

Strip details, examples and extraneous information from the source, then rewrite the main ideas of the paragraph in your own words “in a nutshell”.

Nut shelling example [5]

Original text: “Even though it was located but seven miles from Savannah, in terms of style and grace the Pin Point, Georgia, of the 1940s and 1950s was light-years away from its big city neighbor to the west. With a population of 500, Pin Point was more hamlet than town, more drive-past than drive-in. The thought that this bump in the road could be the birthplace of a child who would rise to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court– a black child who would rise to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court—was inconceivable. The distance from here to there, or, as the justice himself would grow fond of saying, from the outhouse to the courthouse, was simply too great. A black child from Pin Point, Georgia, becoming a member of the U.S. Supreme Court? It simply couldn’t happen. Except that it did.” [4]

Nutshell: Greenya [4] notes that in the small, insignificant town of Pin Point, Georgia, no one would have predicted that one of its citizens, particularly a black citizen, would become a justice for the highest court in the land. However, that is exactly what happened when Clarence Thomas became the second black Supreme Court Justice.

Paraphrasing

Decide what the author “means” by each sentence in the passage, then report the meaning in your own words.

Details are preserved in paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing example [5]

Original text: “Even though it was located but seven miles from Savannah, in terms of style and grace the Pin Point, Georgia, of the 1940s and 1950s was light-years away from its big city neighbor to the west. With a population of 500, Pin Point was more hamlet than town, more drive-past than drive-in. The thought that this bump in the road could be the birthplace of a child who would rise to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court– a black child who would rise to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court—was inconceivable. The distance from here to there, or, as the justice himself would grow fond of saying, from the outhouse to the courthouse, was simply too great. A black child from Pin Point, Georgia, becoming a member of the U.S. Supreme Court? It simply couldn’t happen. Except that it did.” [4]

Paraphrase: In his book, Greenya [4] compares the hometown of Clarence Thomas, Pin Point, Georgia with the well-known town of Savannah and finds Pin Point to be a much less desirable place to visit. The author comments on how unfathomable it seems that this “bump in the road” place would give rise to a Supreme Court Justice. More unbelievable than that would be the thought of that Justice being a black man. However, Greenya points out that the seemingly impossible happened when Clarence Thomas became the second black Supreme Court Justice.

Good and bad paraphrasing

When paraphrasing, it is important to avoid copying phrases and sentence structure. Paraphrases must be rewritten in your own words. What follows are examples of plagiarized paraphrases that simply shuffled phrases and substituted synonyms.

Bad paraphrasing [6]

Original text:“In research writing, sources are cited for two reasons: to alert readers

to the sources of your information and to give credit to the writers from whom you have borrowed words and ideas.” [7]

Plagiarism:In research writing, we cite sources for a couple reasons: to notify

readers of our information sources and give credit to those from whom we have borrowed [7].

NOTE: In this example, providing a citation is NOT enough. The author of the plagiarized passage has also used the creative writing of the author of the original text without crediting him/her appropriately.

Fixing bad paraphrasing [6]

Rewrite in your own words or, if you can’t think of any other way to say it, enclose the original phrases in quotation marks:

Original textIn research writing, sources are cited for two reasons: to alert readers

to the sources of your information and to give credit to the writers from whom you have borrowed words and ideas.

Acceptable paraphrases- NOT plagiarism A researcher cites her sources to ensure her audience knows where

she got her information, and to recognize and credit the original work [7].

In her book A Writer's Reference, Diana Hacker [7] notes, “In research writing, sources are cited for two reasons: to alert readers to the sources of your information and to give credit to the writers from whom you have borrowed words and ideas.“

How to properly cite

To “cite” someone else’s intellectual work you have to do two things:

Mark the passage that is not your own with an in-text citation mark and quotation marks (when appropriate).

List the bibliographic information for the source of the passage in a reference list.

Citing direct quotations ( i.e. word-for-word copying)

Put quotation marks around copied words.Even two-word phrases copied from a

source- if they are unique- must be enclosed in quotation marks.

Put an in-text citation mark after the final quotation mark.

Example: Citing direct quotations

Put quotation marks around copied words. Even two-word phrases copied from a source- if they are unique- must be enclosed in

quotation marks. Put an in-text citation mark after the final quotation mark.

“In research writing, sources are cited for two reasons: to alert readers to the sources of your information and to give credit to the writers from whom you have borrowed words and ideas.” [7]

Citing paraphases

Put an in-text citation mark at the end of each sentence that contains new information, even if it came from the same source as the previous sentence.

Putting one in-text citation mark at the end of a paragraph is NOT sufficient.

Example- a 1-sentence paraphrase:A researcher cites her sources to ensure her

audience knows where she got her information, and to recognize and credit the original work [7].

Citing paraphases: Example

Put an in-text citation mark at the end of each sentence that contains new information, even if it came from the same source as the previous sentence.

Putting one in-text citation mark at the end of a paragraph is NOT sufficient.

Example- a paragraph-length paraphrase: “Giardiasis, the most common waterborne disease

caused by an enteric parasite in humans, is produced by the flagellated protozoan Giardia lamblia (1). The Giardia life cycle present two morphologically distinct forms, trophozoites and cysts. The disease is caused by the trophozoite forms and frequently presents as acute or chronic diarrhea (1). . . Transmission occurs through the ingestion of Giardia cysts, usually from fecally contaminated food or water or interpersonal contact (2).”[8]

In-text citation marks

There are two different ways Number-sequence systems

Insert [#], (#) or # at end of passages, with # replaced with a number representing the order in the paper in which the sources appear.

If same source is cited later in the paper, the number is the same. (e.g. all information from Jones, 1983, is marked [3] throughout the paper because it’s the third source mentioned in the paper, even if the next time it’s mentioned comes after source #12).

Author-year systems Insert (Author last name, year of publication) at end of passages. If two authors: (Last name of first author & last name of second

author, year) If three or more authors: (Last name of first author, et. al., year).

Which to use?

Advantages Disadvantages

Number-sequence

Less typing, papers not so cluttered with references

Must re-number after each round of editing

Author-year Acquaints you with workers in the field, allows you to make connections between publications written by same authors.

Harder to read.

Examples of Number-sequence

“Giardiasis, the most common waterborne disease caused by an enteric parasite in humans, is produced by the flagellated protozoan Giardia lamblia (1). The Giardia life cycle present two morphologically distinct forms, trophozoites and cysts. The disease is caused by the trophozoite forms and frequently presents as acute or chronic diarrhea (1). . . Transmission occurs through the ingestion of Giardia cysts, usually from fecally contaminated food or water or interpersonal contact (2).”[9]

This tutorial. The papers you will write for Biology 100L.

Examples of Author-year

Here is the same passage rewritten in author-year format:

“Giardiasis, the most common waterborne disease caused by an enteric parasite in humans, is produced by the flagellated protozoan Giardia lamblia (Adam, 1991). The Giardia life cycle present two morphologically distinct forms, trophozoites and cysts. The disease is caused by the trophozoite forms and frequently presents as acute or chronic diarrhea (Adam, 1991). . . Transmission occurs through the ingestion of Giardia cysts, usually from fecally contaminated food or water or interpersonal contact (Craun, 1990).”[8]

Reference list

Put at end of paper under a separate heading: “Literature cited”.

Organize in order cited if using number-sequence system.

Organize alphabetically by last name of first author for author-year system.

Bibliographic information to include depends on type of source (website, journal article, book, etc.)

Exact format varies. In Biology 100L we use the format recommended by the Council of Biology Editors.

Minimum bibliographic information to include in your reference lists

Journal articles: Authors’ names, name of journal, volume # and first page # of article, year of publication.

Books: Authors’ names, title of book, year of publication, name of publisher, city of publisher.

WebPages: Name of page author or page sponsor, title of page, URL, date accessed.

Example Reference lists

Number-sequence

Literature cited1. Sambrook, J., Fritsch, E. F. & Maniatis, T.

(1989) Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual (Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Press, Plainview, NY).

2. Holt, W.V. (1982) J Reprod Fertil 64:485-9.

Example Reference lists

Author-year

Literature citedHolt, W.V. (1982) J Reprod Fertil 64:485-9.Sambrook, J., Fritsch, E. F. & Maniatis, T.

(1989) Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual (Cold Spring Harbor Lab. Press, Plainview, NY).

When DON’T I have to cite?

When providing your own, original analysis of other people’s intellectual work

When expressing an original thought of your own

When relating information from your own research or life experience

When reporting “common knowledge”

When DON’T I have to cite?

When providing your own, original analysis or summary of other people’s intellectual work Example: Making a generalization about a pattern or

trend in biology gleaned by reading other people’s papers. E.g. “Eukaryotic genes have introns, but prokaryotic genes don’t”.

But: If someone else makes an analysis or summary that you agree with, it’s still not your own, even if you thought of it before you read the paper. In science, the first person to publish an idea gets credit for it.

When DON’T I have to cite?

When relating information from your own research, or your own life experiences. Example: “A common myth is that swallowed

gum sits in your stomach, undigested, for seven years.”

Example: Any data collected by you or your lab partners in your biology laboratory class.

When DON’T I have to cite?

When reporting “Common Knowledge” Common knowledge. Information that the “common

man” among your peers is likely to already know (without looking it up) before reading your paper.

Use students whose knowledge is limited to what they learned in courses that are pre-requisite to the course you are writing for as your peer group.

The pre-requisite for Biology 100L is a high school diploma. At some schools, you can get a high school diploma without taking high school biology.

“Common Knowledge” in Biology 100/100L

EXAMPLESDiabetes is a disease caused by an

inability to either make or use insulin.DNA is the genetic material in

chromosomes.

NOT common knowledge in Biology 100/100L

EXAMPLESThe symptoms of diabetes are polydipsia,

polyphagia, and polyuria.Mice have 20 chromosomes.

Common misconceptions

I only need to cite the source of direct quotations.

I don’t need to cite information I get from the internet.

When I summarize information in my own words, (i.e. paraphrase) it becomes my work, so I don’t need to cite the information source.

If the instructor tells us to use certain sources, he/she already knows where we got our information, so I don’t need to cite.

FAQ’s #1

Q. Why don’t I have to cite sources when answering questions in my lab manual?

A. Questions in lab manuals usually ask you to do one of two things:

1) report or interpret your original results from an experiment, 2) apply information you’ve been given to a specific situation.

Your data, your interpretations of your data, and your analyses are your own original work, and so all of these are adequately cited by the name (your name) at the top of the assignment.

FAQ’s #2

Q. I’ve written papers during the entire 3 years I’ve been in college, but this is the first time I’ve ever been charged with plagiarism. Why now?

A. Plagiarism is an issue that only comes up when your assignment requires you to consult other peoples’ writing. Unless you copy another student’s paper, or are writing a “library research paper”, it’s rarely an issue in your creative writing classes (like Engl100). In your lab courses, it only comes up when writing the introduction or discussion sections of lab reports. It also takes time, training, and familiarity with the original sources to detect, so perhaps your instructors missed it before.

FAQ’s #3

Q. Some places define plagiarism as “misrepresentation of authorship”. While I forget to put an in-text citation mark in my paper, I also never put in a mark saying the information was mine. So why is that misrepresentation?

A. When you put your name at the top of a paper, you’re claiming that the words, ideas and information in the paper is yours. In-text citations and quotation marks show the reader the exceptions to that rule. If a passage is not marked, it’s assumed to be the author’s work by default.

FAQ’s #4

Q. I never see citation marks or reference lists in newspaper articles or magazines. Are you saying that THEY are plagiarizers?

A. Magazines and newspapers primarily use interviews with “experts” or “the man on the scene” as their source of information, so they only need to mention the name and the qualifications of the person they are interviewing (e.g. “according to John Jones, the deputy chief of administration”…). The quality of the information they give you, therefore, is only as good as that “expert’s” memory or knowledge of his/her field. Caveat emptor!

But I didn’t know!!

Ignorance is not an excuse. It is your responsibility to become informed.

This guide was written to address the surprising lack of knowledge about plagiarism encountered in students in our courses. However, it is your responsibility to read it, understand it, and ask questions if you don’t.

Resources

Citation style guides (including Council of Biology Editors). http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/reference/BI/styleguides.php3

UMBC Policies on Academic Integrity www.umbc.edu/integrity

UMBC Kuhn Library webpage on plagiarism: http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/reference/plagiarism.php3

Literature cited

1. Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, OMIM (TM). Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. MIM Number: 222100: 12/8/2003: . URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/omim/. Accessed 1/10/2004.

2. Anonymous. Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Homepage. URL: http://www.jdrf.org/index.cfm. Accessed 1/10/2004.

3. Anonymous. “Phenylketonuria”. Genes and Disease. URL: http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?call=bv.View..ShowSection&rid=gnd. Accessed 1/10/2004.

4. Greenya, John. Silent Justice: The Clarence Thomas Story. NJ: Barricade Books, Inc., 2001.

5. Patricia Denver and LaTasha Tucker. “Plagiarism: What it is and how to Avoid It.” in Lark Claassen, ed., Symbiosis. Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2003.

6. Student Judicial Affairs, University of California, Davis. October 1999. Avoiding Plagiarism: Mastering the Art of Scholarship. http://sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm. Accessed October 2003.

7. Hacker D. A Writer’s Reference. London: St. Martin’s Press; 1995.

8. HD Lujan, et al. (1996) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 93, 7628-7633.