Identify plagiarism

Key notes :

Plagiarism is the act of taking another person’s work or ideas and presenting them as your own, either accidentally or on purpose. When you use an outside source in your own writing, you should make sure to cite the source in order to avoid plagiarism. Consider the following source:

Fisher, Goddu and Keil, ‘Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge’. Copyright 2015 by the American Psychological Association

The results of these experiments suggest that searching the internet may cause a systematic failure to recognise the extent to which we rely on outsourced knowledge. Searching for explanations on the internet inflates self-assessed knowledge in unrelated domains.

If you use a direct quotation in your writing, you must use quotation marks around the exact words that were copied from the source, in addition to citing the source.

x Researchers have found that relying on the internet for information may cause a systematic failure to recognise the extent to which we rely on outsourced knowledge. This sentence is plagiarised because it uses the source’s exact words without quotation marks and without properly citing the source.

✔ Researchers have found that relying on the internet for information ‘may cause a systematic failure to recognise the extent to which we rely on outsourced knowledge’ (Fisher, Goddu and Keil).

If you paraphrase a source, or put a source’s ideas into your own words, you must still cite the source. Even if properly cited, a paraphrase that is too similar to the source in wording or sentence structure is still considered plagiarised.

x According to Fisher, Goddu and Keil, searching the internet can lead to a regular failure to perceive the extent to which we rely on outside knowledge. This sentence is plagiarised because it is an insufficient paraphrase. Even though it is properly cited, it borrows too much of the source’s wording and sentence structure.

✔ According to Fisher, Goddu and Keil, relying on the internet to look up information can make it difficult for us to estimate how much of our knowledge comes from internal versus external sources.

There are different rules about how to format citations, such as when to include page numbers for print sources. Check a style guide, such as the Modern Language Association (MLA) Handbook, for a complete list of these rules.

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