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 or inexpensive 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. The Library has a subscription to Refworks. 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.
