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Plagiarism

Plagiarism is when you use somebody else’s work without properly citing it.

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by Nina Paley

Examples of Plagiarism:

  • copying text without quotes or citing sources
  • poor paraphrasing — using a thesaurus to find synonyms without changing the sentence structure or order of ideas and not citing
  • quoting many large passages, even with citations, and no original ideas
  • many passages of too closely paraphrased text, even with citations
  • properly citing some passages, while not citing others

You must create a citation:

  • whenever you quote
  • whenever you use someone else’s idea, research,data, pictures, music
  • whenever you paraphrase
  • whenever someone else’s work influences your own ideas

See our page on note-taking and creating citations.

Consequences of plagiarism at Orono Middle and High Schools may include:

  • involvement of parents/guardians
  • zero for assignment/class
  • detention
  • suspension
  • banned from game/sport/club

The high school uses the MLA citation style.  See the Purdue OWL MLA Formatting and Style Guide for more information.

Citation Dissection:

So what is a citation anyway?  It’s how you tell readers whose ideas you used.  It usually includes the author’s name, information about the work you used, and where exactly in the work is the part you used.

Ex:

Ahlquist, John S., et al. “Alien Abduction and Voter Impersonation in the 2012 U.S. General Election: Evidence from a Survey List Experiment.” Election Law Journal, vol. 13, no. 4, Dec. 2014, pp. 460-475. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1089/elj.2013.0231.

The title of the article is “Alien Abduction and Voter Impersonation….”, the authors are Alquist, Mayer and Jackman.  The journal is Election Law Journal and it was published in 2014.  The issue is 13 and the number is 4, the pages of the article are 460-475.