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PLAGIARISM

What is plagiarism?

The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd Edition) defines plagiarism as “the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one's own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas (literary, artistic, musical, mechanical, etc.) of another.”

In other words, plagiarism is the result of dishonest, lazy scholarship.

EXAMPLES OF PLAGIARISM

- Explicit plagiarism- Stringing Quotes- Stealing Ideas- Excessive Paraphrasing

EXAMPLES OF ACADEMIC HONESTY

- Quotation to support a point- Brief paraphrase to support a point- Referring to the thesis of another work- Common Knowledge

EVALUATING SOURCES

- What are scholarly/academic publications and how do they differ from other types of publications?”

- Every periodical (a publication, like a magazine, that appears at regular intervals throughout the year) has a primary purpose or mission, and an intended audience.

- For the scholarly journals that you are expected to read in college, the purpose is to provide a means by which academic professionals from the same field of study can communicate with each other.

EVALUATING SOURCES CONT.

- How can I distinguish scholarly/academic articles from the more news/information type of articles?

- In all of the scholarly publications, one can generally expect to find three types of articles: review articles, theoretical articles, and research articles.

EVALUATING SOURCES CONT.

- My professor wants me to find an “original” research article. How can I tell it is original as apposed to just a ‘think piece’ or a literature review?

- There are big clues in the abstract to a research article, or in the research article itself that indicate that the authors conducted an original study.

EVALUATING SOURCES CONT.

- My professor says that I cannot use sources from the Internet, but librarians are always pointing me to the computers to find articles. Why?

- Learn to distinguish search engines (ex: Google or Yahoo) on the World Wide Web (WWW) from the subscription databases that the library provides over an Internet connection.

- Fortunately you do not have to rely on the Web for scholarly journal articles

- Many school libraries subscribe to databases that index the content of hundreds of news/information and scholarly journals

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

- Visit the class website and download a copy of these notes

- http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/01/

- http://www.uamont.edu/library/guide/index.htm