Plagiarism and Academic Integrity Tutorial

We often assume that all people who plagiarize are deliberately dishonest. In fact intentionally planned plagiarism is fairly rare. Much of plagiarism is simply due to carelessness, or to not understanding what plagiarism means. 

Since most plagiarism is unintentional, the best way to avoid plagiarism is to develop good habits of scholarship and writing, and to be familiar with the concepts related to plagiarism. Some of the necessary habits of scholarship are simple common sense. When writing a paper:

• give yourself enough time to do a good job. Students who procrastinate are more likely to plagiarize because rushing makes them sloppy. (Being out of time is also the primary incentive for deliberate dishonesty.)
• revise your paper. Significant re-writing can eliminate plagiarized passages.
• proofread for errors. Proofreading can help you find missing citations and quotation marks, as well as other errors.

Using other people’s ideas is a recognized and important part of being a good scholar. It becomes plagiarism only if credit is not given appropriately to the original source.