CISC 1001 Lab#5

In this lab, we will learn what plagirism is and why it is important to give credit properly in order to avoid plagiarism.

Using someone else's words or ideas or products without giving credit to the source.
Sometimes this is obviously "stealing" or "copying" - e.g., copying material out of a book and handing it in as your term paper.
Sometimes plagiarism is not done on purpose. If you paraphrase material without citing it properly, that is still considered plagiarism. You are using the ideas of the source, whether you are using the exact words or not.
Even if a resource is posted on the Web, it is still protected by laws of copyright (even without a "copyright" label on it). Copyright protects intellectual property which includes any expression of original ideas including text, pictures, music, software.

Just plain wrong - you are stealing someone else's ideas or words.
Not citing a work properly is not fair to the person whose work you are using. He/she deserves the credit for the work that was done.
You don't learn anything by copying....
You should be able to take pride in your work and in presenting a report using your own ideas and your own words.
You may have wrong information. If you report it as your own, you are responsible for the facts. If you cite a source, the source is responsible for the facts.
If nothing else, be afraid of the consequences - you can be failed in a course or even expelled (or fired from a job, or fined)

"cut and paste" makes it very easy to copy chunks of material.
downloading music and pictures is very easy and probably nobody would know.
surfing the web and jumping from site to site makes it hard to keep track of sources

You need to attribute a source when you quote from it directly, or paraphrase or even summarize the ideas in your own words.
Within the body of the report, you use short citations to attribute the source. At the end of the report, you include more information about each source in the bibliography.
There are various standardized "styles" for citations and bibliographies. Sometimes different styles are used in different disciplines. Regardless of the format of the style, the purpose is to make it clear which work is being referenced (author, title, year of publication) (Not following the style properly is not plagiarism - it's similar to making grammatical errors in a paper... but why not do it properly... The library has resources to help with style.)
Citations can be "inline" or in the form of footnotes or endnotes.
A bibliography is a separate page of references at the end of the paper.
If you are using a source's exact words, you must put quotations around the words, even if you include a citation.
If you paraphrase or summarize using your own words, you must still include a citation to show that the ideas are not your own.
If you paraphrase some of the author's words, but not all, you must use quotations around the words that you are quoting directly.

Original works are protected by copyright for a certain amount of time after publication, even if they aren't labeled "copyright" (the amount of time varies; it can be up to 120 years.) This includes articles, books, web sites, images, music.
You are not allowed to photocopy or download copies of copyrighted materials without permission of the author.
Exceptions
- Facts that are common knowledge (e.g., George Washington was the first US President.)
- Some works are in the public domain. Then anyone may copy or use it, but the author must still be credited.
- US Government publications (e.g., the Constitution)
- copyright has expired (e.g., works of Shakespeare)
- author waives copyright (some programmers provide "freeware" or "shareware")
- Even when works are protected by copyright, the Fair Use Doctrine provides guidelines under which they can be used for teaching and research. The guidelines are complicated and just allow minimal use. If, for example, a College course uses a Course Pak, the cost of the Course Pak includes the cost of paying publishers for the right to copy pages from their texts. Also, if copyrighted images are used on a website, the attribution of the images should be given.

The same technology that makes it easy to plagiarize also makes it easy to detect. Entering a phrase into Google can bring up the original source.
Software such as Turnitin can be used to compare student papers with standard sources and even with other student papers. For example, it can detect a paper that was copied from a student submission the previous semester. MOSS is software that can be used to detect plagiarism of computer assignments.
famous cases of plagiarism and their outcomes:
- University of Virginia expelled 48 students after a physics professor discovered plagiarism by using a search engine. (UVA prides itself on its honor code.)
- Harvard withdrew admission of a HS valedictorian who plagiarized columns in a local newspaper.
- The United States Naval Academy demoted a history professor whose book on the creation of the atomic bomb contained plagiarized material. His pay was cut by at least $10,000 a year.
- Rock musician Andre Young paid over 1.5M in lawsuits over plagiarism.
- Jayson Blair, NY Times reporter, was found to have engaged in frequent acts of "journalistic fraud." He resigned; two other editors (his superiors) were forced to resign because of the scandal.

Further resources on plagiarism: