Academic Work

Plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of someone else’s work. The word comes from a Latin word for “kidnapping,” and plagiarism is indeed the stealing of something engendered by someone else.

—SYLVAN BARNET AND HUGO BEDAU, Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument, 2ND ED. BOSTON: BEDFORD, 1996.

In order to write informed academic papers, students and scholars frequently rely on the expertise of other thinkers and researchers. As long as the original author is properly acknowledged and the source of the outside material properly documented, there is no problem. However, if a student or scholar fails to acknowledge the words or ideas of someone else, or follows the original structure and phrasing of someone else’s writing too closely, he or she is guilty of plagiarism.

Plagiarism takes a variety of forms. Unacknowledged, word-for-word copying of sections of a book, newspaper article, online document, or another student’s paper is the most extreme form of plagiarism. Even more extreme than plagiarism is outright fraud, which includes submitting as one’s own work a paper purchased from an online term-paper mill or “borrowing” an old paper from a friend. Students who commit fraud can face Suspension, or Expulsion. In its less extreme manifestations, plagiarism involves cutting-and-pasting the words and phrases of someone else into one’s own writing without quotation marks. Students with careless research methods who rely overly on online sources frequently find themselves committing plagiarism when they have copy-and-pasted phrases from a variety of websites into their Word document and cannot remember which words are their own and which belong to someone else.

It is important to note that plagiarism is not always committed intentionally. You may be accused of and punished for plagiarism even if you did not intend to plagiarize or if the plagiarism stems from ignorance of the rules or careless research methods. It is your responsibility to learn the rules of citing and documenting sources and to conduct your research carefully. The United States legal system rigorously defends the copyright and intellectual property of authors, artists, scholars, inventors, and corporations. In the “real world,” plagiarists who steal the ideas and words of someone else can face expensive lawsuits with consequent loss of reputation; some high-profile plagiarists have even lost their jobs. In a University setting, students who plagiarize face disciplinary action, notations on transcripts, and possibly Suspension.

Because the penalties for plagiarism can be so severe, it is very important for you to learn how to conduct research with care and how to cite and document sources correctly. When you rely on outside sources in an academic paper, you must always:

1. Quote and acknowledge the words written by someone else
2. Acknowledge original ideas belonging to someone else
3. When paraphrasing or summarizing, avoid using phrases too close to the original, even if the source is properly acknowledged

Hugo Bedau, Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Tufts University, has graciously allowed us to use sections of his essay “The Case Against the Death Penalty” to illustrate the use and misuse of sources in the following examples.

He writes:

It is often argued that death is what murderers deserve, and that those who oppose the death penalty violate the fundamental principle that criminals should be punished according to their deserts—“making the punishment fit the crime.” If this principle is understood to require that punishments are unjust unless they are like the crime itself, then the principle is unacceptable. It would require us to rape rapists, torture torturers, and inflict other horrible and degrading punishments on offenders. It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again, punishments impossible to inflict. Since we cannot reasonably aim to punish all crimes according to this principle, it is arbitrary to invoke it as a requirement of justice in the punishment of murderers. If, however, the principle of just deserts is understood to require that the severity of punishments must be proportional to the gravity of the crime, and that murder being the gravest crime deserves the severest punishment, then the principle is no doubt sound. But it does not compel support for the death penalty. What it does require is that crimes other than murder be punished with terms of imprisonment or other deprivations less severe than those used in the punishment of murder.

Criminals no doubt deserve to be punished, and punished with severity appropriate to their culpability and the harm they have caused to the innocent. But severity of punishment has its limits—imposed both by justice and our common human dignity.

—From Hugo Bedau, “The Case Against the Death Penalty.” Capital Punishment Project. ACLU. July 1992. Web. 8 July 2010.

A. Word-For-Word Plagiarism

When we research a topic, we sometimes find a source that says what we want to say, frequently in words better than we feel we could write. In these cases, it may be tempting to copy sections of the source, but you would in fact be plagiarizing it piece by piece.

Example-- WRONG:

Proponents of capital punishment often argue that punishment must fit the crime, and therefore, death is the only appropriate punishment for a murderer. If this idea is understood to require that punishments are unjust unless they are like the crime itself, then the principle is unacceptable. It would require us to rape rapists, torture torturers, and inflict other horrible and degrading punishments on offenders. It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again, punishments impossible to inflict. Since we cannot reasonably aim to punish all crimes according to this principle, it is arbitrary to invoke it as a requirement of justice in the punishment of murderers. If, however, the principle of just deserts is understood to require that the severity of punishments must be proportional to the seriousness of the crime, and that murder being the most extreme crime deserves the severest punishment, then the principle is no doubt sound. But it does not compel us to support capital punishment.

In the example above, the writer copies a large section of Professor Bedau’s essay, rewriting the first sentence, changing “gravity” to “seriousness,” changing “grave” to “extreme,” and slightly rephrasing the last sentence. Even though a few words have been changed from the original, this kind of copying constitutes word-for-word plagiarism. To avoid plagiarism, the writer could have kept the original as it was, acknowledged Hugo Bedau as the source, and put the entire passage in quotation marks. Properly acknowledging the source demonstrates the extent of one’s research and helps one integrate the source into one’s own argument, as this example illustrates:

Example-- APPROPRIATE:

Hugo Bedau, professor of philosophy at Tufts University and an expert on ethics, illustrates the lack of logic behind the idea that the death penalty is the only fitting punishment for a murderer:

If this principle is understood to require that punishments are unjust unless they are like the crime itself, then the principle is unacceptable. It would require us to rape rapists, torture torturers, and inflict other horrible and degrading punishments on offenders. It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again, punishments impossible to inflict. Since we cannot reasonably aim to punish all crimes according to this principle, it is arbitrary to invoke it as a requirement of justice in the punishment of murderers (1992).

In correctly acknowledging Professor Bedau, the writer incorporates some background information about Bedau’s credentials as part of an introduction to the quotation and then follows up with a response to Bedau’s words. Because it is a long quotation—over four lines long—the writer has indented it. Note that because Professor Bedau is acknowledged as the author of the quotation, the writer does not have to include his name in the parenthetical citation at the end of the quotation.

B. The Mosaic Pattern of Plagiarism        

Many students erroneously believe they can copy from a source but avoid plagiarism if they “just change the wording around.” Other students commit plagiarism when they carelessly copy-and-paste sections of online documents into their own writing and “forget” to put quotation marks around the original phrasing.

Example-- WRONG:

Opposition to the death penalty does not mean one is soft on crime. Indeed, death penalty opponents believe that criminals deserve to be punished, and punished with severity appropriate to their guilt and the harm they have caused to the innocent. But severity of punishment has its limits—imposed both by justice and our common human dignity. For example, if the logic of those who support capital punishment is followed fully, it would require us to rape rapists, torture torturers, bomb bombers, and inflict other terrible, degrading punishments on offenders. It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again, punishments impossible to inflict. Obviously, these forms of punishment are ludicrous, but then so is the illogic of capital punishment (Bedau, 1992).

In the example above, the writer has taken two sentences near the end of Professor Bedau’s essay and placed them before two sentences that came earlier in the essay. The writer has also replaced “culpability” with “guilt,” and added the phrase “bomb bombers.” To avoid accusations of plagiarism, the writer has actually cited Bedau at the end of the paragraph—but, because the parenthetical citation is attached to the last sentence, the reader can only assume that Bedau has contributed an idea only to that last sentence. This sample constitutes plagiarism because the writer failed to identify (with quotation marks and a citation in the appropriate place) the words belonging to Professor Bedau. To avoid plagiarism, the writer must place quotation marks around Professor Bedau’s words.

Example-- APPROPRIATE:

Opposition to the death penalty does not mean one is soft on crime. Indeed, death penalty opponents believe that “criminals deserve to be punished, and punished with severity appropriate to their culpability and the harm they have caused to the innocent. But severity of punishment has its limits—imposed both by justice and our common human dignity” (Bedau, 1992). For example, if the logic of those who support capital punishment is followed fully, “it would require us to rape rapists, torture torturers, and inflict other horrible and degrading punishments on offenders. It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again, punishments impossible to inflict” (Bedau, 1992). Obviously, these forms of punishment are ludicrous, but then so is the illogic of capital punishment.

Note that in this correct version, the parenthetical citations appear immediately after the sentences borrowed from Bedau, and that everything inside the quotation marks is exactly as Bedau has written it. It is important to remember that everything inside quotation marks must be the same as the original—even spelling errors!

C. Borrowed Language

When writing from sources, one frequently finds clever phrases that seem to encapsulate one’s own thoughts perfectly. However, even a short phrase of one or two words must be cited properly to avoid stealing the unique phrasing of another writer. This is sometimes very difficult if you are writing in a language in which you are not yet fluent.

Example-- WRONG:

Death penalty opponents have crafted many complex arguments to capital punishment. Appealing to their own skewed notions of human dignity, they assert that murderers, terrorists, and other violent criminals should be punished with imprisonment or other deprivations less severe than death. Justice and human dignity, however, demand that the punishment fit the crime—if murderers are to be punished with severity appropriate to their culpability and the harm they have caused to the innocent victims and their families, the only punishment severe enough for the gravity of the crime is that of death.

While the example above is almost entirely in the writer’s own words, some unique phrasing belongs to Professor Bedau’s original essay. The phrases “imprisonment or other deprivations less severe” and “punished with severity appropriate to their culpability and the harm they have caused to the innocent” are exactly the same phrasing used by Professor Bedau and need to be placed in quotation marks and acknowledged as Bedau’s or rewritten in the writer’s own words. To make a stronger argument, the writer should consider debating Professor Bedau’s essay directly and openly using the quotations as parts of the rhetoric of the debate. Note that certain common phrases do not need to be cited. Phrases such as “human dignity,” “the punishment fit the crime,” and “the gravity of the crime” are so frequently used in the public domain and in everyday speech that they do not need to be attributed to anyone.

D. Paraphrasing

The appropriate use of paraphrase and summary is essential to good academic writing. However, many students do not paraphrase correctly and commit plagiarism by accident when they too closely follow the phrasing and sentence structure of the original source.

Inappropriate Paraphrasing (Plagiarism):

Paraphrase (P) Some argue that death is what killers deserve,
Original (O) It is often argued that death is what murderers deserve,
(P) and that those who oppose capital punishment violate the essential principle
(O) and that those who oppose the death penalty violate the fundamental principle
(P) that criminals should be punished according to what they deserve—
(O) that criminals should be punished according to their deserts—
(P) in other words, the punishment must fit the crime.
(O) making the punishment fit the crime.
(P) If we understand this principle to mean that punishments
(O) If this principle is understood to require that punishments
(P) are not just if they are not like the crime itself, then the principle is wrong.
(O) are unjust unless they are like the crime itself, then the principle is unacceptable.
(P) It would require us to rape rapists, torture torturers, bomb bombers,
(O) It would require us to rape rapists, torture torturers,
(P) and inflict other terrible, disgusting punishments on criminals.
(O) and inflict other horrible and degrading punishments on offenders.
(P) It would even require us to kill serial killers again and again—
(O) It would require us to betray traitors and kill multiple murderers again and again,
(P) clearly this is impossible.
(O) punishments impossible to inflict.

As we can see, inappropriate paraphrasing copies the sentence structure and phrasing of the original too closely. This happens when students attempt to “just change the wording around.” To paraphrase correctly, it is important to read the original closely to understand it, turn it over, and attempt to explain it in your own words. Then check your paraphrase against the original to make sure you have conveyed its points and subpoints correctly and have not unintentionally mimicked its phrasing too closely. The paraphrase below was written using this method.

Appropriate Paraphrasing:

In his essay “The Case Against the Death Penalty,” Hugo Bedau reveals the logical flaws in the principle of just deserts, the argument that death is the only way to make the punishment fit the crime in cases of murder. Essentially, Bedau argues that to follow the old injunction of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” in modern social policy is to follow a false analogy. For if killing must be punished by killing, then all crimes must be punished with the equivalent punishment: rapists punished with rape, torturers punished with torture, et cetera, ad nauseum. Bedau points out that what is called for is not equivalent punishment, but proportional punishment.

E. Common Knowledge

The examples above have illustrated what must be quoted and cited to avoid plagiarism. But sometimes students go from one extreme of not citing anything to the absurd extreme of citing everything. You do not have to cite what is called “common knowledge”—information, facts, ideas, popular sayings, and commonsense principles that are well known, widespread, and usually noncontroversial. For example, it is well known that Sigmund Freud was a famous psychoanalyst who advocated what he called the “talking cure.” This is common knowledge. If you look up his date of birth in an encyclopedia, this too is common knowledge because it is noncontroversial and every encyclopedia will contain the same date. If you are familiar with his theories of the id, ego, and superego, you can discuss these without having to cite Freud or a psychology textbook because these are generally well known. However, if you discuss Freud’s case study of the Wolf-Man in a paper, you should cite it. Keep in mind, however, that as you conduct more in-depth research on a topic, you start to become an expert in that area and discover that certain ideas are “common knowledge” within that field but not for a general audience. If citing what is a very basic idea in a specialized field seems tedious, it may not need to be cited because it may be common knowledge. However, if you have any doubt, it is always best to cite.

F. Citing and Documenting Print and Online Sources

All college students and scholars need to know how to cite and document sources correctly. Citation occurs at the level of the sentence or paragraph. This is when you acknowledge your sources within your sentence (“According to Professor Bedau”) and when you include a parenthetical citation or footnote at the end of each sentence that contains words or ideas originating with another writer. Documentation occurs at the end of your paper in the form of a bibliography that allows your reader to check your sources. (Footnotes and endnotes can also be used.) Bibliographies are also called “References,” “Works Cited,” and “Works Consulted,” depending on the documentation style you are using. “Works Cited” and “References” list every source (including books, journals, websites, films, interviews, etc.) that you quoted, paraphrased, summarized, referred to, or discussed in your paper. If you did lots of research and read many sources but only used a few in your paper, you may wish to add a list of “Works Consulted;” this includes everything that formed the background of your research but was not actually cited in the paper itself.

Documentation styles are shorthand codes that scholars use to include as much data about their sources in as little space as possible. The documentation styles are determined by important scholarly organizations and publishers. There are three main styles of documentation used at the college level. MLA style is an author-page number system used extensively within the humanities. APA style is an author-date system used in the social sciences. Most college-level writing handbooks available at Tufts’ bookstore describe how to use the MLA and APA styles in detail because these are the styles professors usually prefer. Chicago style (or footnotes) can be used in any discipline. Turabian style is a simplified version of Chicago-style footnotes often used for high school and college term papers. In addition to MLA, APA, and Chicago/Turabian styles, the fields of chemistry, biology, and math have their own numeric systems of citing sources. If you are confused about which documentation style to use, ask your professor for guidance. If your professor says the style is up to you, choose one style and follow the guidelines in your handbook carefully. Be consistent and do not mix styles.

Conducting research online is extremely convenient and fast, especially in the early stages of researching a topic, but online sources may not always be adequate or appropriate for college-level scholarship. Many websites (including Wikipedia) lack the depth, reliability, and authority of scholarly, peer-reviewed books and journals. While many peer-reviewed journals and books are now available in full-text format online, students must take care when conducting research entirely from a computer terminal because sloppy research methods can result in plagiarism (especially when passages are copy-and-pasted into a Word document). It is your responsibility to use extreme caution when using online or electronic sources in a research paper.

There are some excellent websites and online journals that are in-depth, authoritative, up-to-date, and have been peer-reviewed. These, unfortunately, are rare. Much of the information you find online may be erroneous, unreliable, or pure propaganda. It is your responsibility to make sure the online sources you use are as reliable as the books and journals found in the library—all of which, by the way, have been selected for their thoroughness, prestige, accuracy, and reliability. If you are considering using an online source, you should answer these questions: Who wrote this and what are their credentials? Is the Web site sponsored by or affiliated with a legitimate, recognized organization? Is this information intended as advertisement or propaganda? How up-to-date is this information? The Tisch Library offers in-depth workshops on conducting library research, conducting electronic searches, and evaluating online sources.

Online sources and other electronic media require the same kind of citation and documentation as traditional books and journals. If you are citing a full-text document from an online database, cite the document as you would a regular book or journal article, but add the electronic source information to the bibliographic entry. If you are citing a Web site, you will need much more information than just a URL address. You will need to know the name of the author, if one is listed; if not, use the name of the organization sponsoring the Web site. You will need to know the title of the online document or section of the Web site. The Web site itself should have its own title. You will also need to know the date on which the document was posted or the date of the last update. You should also record the date on which you accessed the Web site. And, of course, you will need a shortened version of the URL address. If you are using parenthetical citations in your paper, do not list the URL in the parentheses! Instead, list the online author and page number or section number (or the online author and date posted).

WRONG way to cite a Web site as a parenthetical citation in your paper

If you are using MLA style, list the author’s last name and paragraph number, if these exist. If not, list the Web site sponsor or title of the online document in the parentheses, and nothing else. If you are using APA style, list the author’s last name (or Web site sponsor or document title) and the year of publication in the parentheses.

CORRECT MLA style in-text parenthetical citation: (Bedau)
CORRECT APA style in-text parenthetical citation: (Bedau 1992)

To document the Web site or electronic source in your bibliography, follow the style guidelines in your writing handbook. Generally, websites and other electronic sources are documented like books and journals:

CORRECT MLA style bibliographic entry:
Bedau, Hugo Adam. “The Case Against the Death Penalty.” Capital Punishment Project: ACLU. July 1992. Web. 8 July 2010
CORRECT APA style bibliographic entry:
Bedau, H. A. (1992, July). The Case Against the Death Penalty. [Online document]. Capital Punishment Project of American Civil Liberties Union. <http://users.rcn.com/mwood/deathpen.html>

G. For More Information

The following websites offer excellent advice on citing sources and avoiding plagiarism:

“Citing Sources” section of the Research Guides @ Tufts Web page (scroll down to find the link for “Citing Sources” in the Tool Box)

Research Paper Navigator is Tufts’ time-management tool and step-by-step guide for writing research-based papers.

Research and Documentation Online is Diana Hacker’s detailed and thorough guide to writing about research in college. Sample papers show how to write for different academic fields using the four major documentation styles (MLA, APA, Chicago, and CSE).

Purdue Online Writing Lab is the best online writing resource for college students. See their excellent tutorials on using APA Style and MLA Style. The Web site also includes a grammar guide for speakers of English as a Second Language.