"Your first duty as a researcher is to get the facts right. Your second duty is to tell readers where the facts came from." --Kate Turabian
The purpose of any citation method is the same:
Plagiarism, one form of academic misconduct, is defined in the ‘Code of Student Conduct’ within the UWF Student Handbook as “the act of representing the ideas, words, creations or work of another as one's own." The document further explains that “plagiarism combines theft with fraud.”
Simply stated, plagiarism is stealing another person’s intellectual property or using someone else's work without giving him or her appropriate credit.
Black’s Law Dictionary defines intellectual property as follows:
1. A category of intangible rights protecting commercially valuable products of the human intellect; the category comprises primarily trademark, copyright, and patent rights, but also includes trade-secret rights, publicity rights, moral rights, and rights against unfair competition.
2. A commercially valuable product of the human intellect, in a concrete or abstract form, such as a copyrightable work, a protectable trademark, a patentable invention, or a trade secret.
Plagiarism can take many forms, including each of the following:
Watch this brief video for help understanding and avoiding plagiarism:
Whenever you quote, summarize, or paraphrase, you must acknowledge the original source. If you do not directly credit your source in a citation, YOU ARE PLAGIARIZING!
If you quote a source, you must quote exactly, word for word, and then cite the source within your paper using a footnote.
Like direct quotes, the sources for summaries and paraphrases must also be cited. Cite these exactly as you would a quotation. Because summaries and paraphrases are merely condensed versions of someone else's work, you must give the original author credit for the information.
Copying and pasting, rendered both easy and potentially tempting by the wealth of the information available via the Internet, also constitutes plagiarism. If you copy a passage electronically from an online source, you must place it in quotations and cite its source.
Common knowledge consists of facts and sayings that are well known by a large number of people or information that is included in multiple sources.
Examples:
Because these are generally known facts, they are considered common knowledge and do not, therefore, need to be cited. You must, however, document facts that are not well known and ideas that interpret facts.
Example:
The idea that "Bush's relationship with Congress has hindered family leave legislation" is not a fact, but an interpretation. Consequently, you need to cite your source.