Plagiarism can be unintentional or intentional when ideas, text, and creative work are used but not cited in academic, professional, and personal work.
Common forms of plagiarism can include:
- Passing off another's ideas or work as your own
- Fabricating citations
- Copying, cutting and pasting without citing the original source
- Paraphrasing incorrectly
- Using media files, such as image, audio or video files without citing them
How will you know if something is common knowledge? Consider:
- Can it be found in many different places?
- Is it widely known by a lot of different people?
Use your common sense — when in doubt, ask!
Tips to Avoid Plagiarism
- Use the decision trees over on the right to determine what and when to cite.
- Familiarize yourself with the distinctions between quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing, and how to use each. The Purdue OWL tutorial also includes a sample essay that uses all three.
- Keep track of what you are quoting and paraphrasing from your sources. Cite these sources as you write your rough draft to reduce confusion as you go.
- PC Magazine has a list of free notetaking and outliner apps (I'm a big fan of Evernote).
- Use a style guide to cite your sources. For this class, it would be ACS (American Chemical Society).
- There are also tools to help you manage your references, including free ones like Zotero and Mendeley. These allow you to insert and format references within your paper as well as create bibliographies.
- When in doubt, cite it. Common knowledge doesn't have to be cited, but you need to know what is considered common.
