Organizing Academic Research Papers: Avoiding Plagiarism

According to SHU's Academic Integrity Policy, plagiarism is: any act of misrepresenting the sources of one's information and ideas. When writing essays, it is the act of presenting another person's written words or ideas as one's own. When reporting experimental work, it includes the acts of falsifying data and presenting another's data as one's own. In speeches, it involves quoting passages of others' speeches or written words without mention of the author.

Forms of plagiarism therefore include, but are not limited to:

• Copying whole papers or passages from another student or from any source.
• Allowing another student to copy or submit one's work.
• Buying or obtaining a paper from any source, including term-paper sellers and internet sources, and submitting that paper or passages of it as one's own work.
• Pasting a passage from the internet or any computer source into one's paper without quoting and attributing the passage.
• Fabricating or falsifying a bibliography.

Credit must be given when using one of the following in the own research paper:

• another person's idea, opinion, or theory
• any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings or other non-textual elements used or that you adapted from another source
• any pieces of information that are not common knowledge
• quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words
• paraphrase of another person's spoken or written words