It is using ideas or the work of another person and presenting it as your own work. It can take a number of forms:

• Copying - cutting and pasting work
• Colluding - where two or more people work together to produce a piece of work but where all or part of the work is submitted as their own work

It applies to all types of sources and media: text, illustrations, photographs, musical quotations, mathematical derivations, computer code, material downloaded from websites, drawn from manuscripts, published and unpublished material including lecture handouts and other students' work.

When citing, remember to include inverted commas/speech marks to indicate direct quotation. Only when discussing another's ideas in your own words, should you omit these, but still cite the work and where you found the ideas. You must always use page references, unless you are describing the overarching thesis contained in a paper or book, and even then, there will probably be an exact place in the text where you could cite that idea.

Even if you give details of your sources, you must remember to construct your argument from your own words and only use sources to support that. You need to demonstrate that you have understood the existing scholarship rather stringing together their words for the majority of your text. The aim of an essay is to provide evidence of critical evaluation and independent thought, rather than reporting on the views of others.

To help you distinguish between your thoughts and that of another, it is important to keep clear notes that easily define your contribution versus the words of the author.

• Cite resources you have consulted for everything that isn’t common knowledge. Ideas or interpretations would not normally be considered common knowledge.
• Therefore cite when reporting, quoting, paraphrasing and summarising

There are some examples of the subtleties of plagiarism on Bowdoin College's plagiarism web pages.

Northern Illinois University also provides from textual examples of the different types of plagiarism.

The following information is intended as a guide to copyright and does not constitute legal advice.

Copyright is one of a bundle of rights which help to ensure that a work is not used without permission.  Copyright is automatically granted once the work has been produced in a tangible form, for example written down.  In most cases the first copyright holder is the author of the work.

The rights of the author can be divided into two groups – the moral right to be identified as the author and the economic right to make money from their work. The author retains the moral rights but may choose to give away the economic rights, for example by publishing in a journal. More information about these rights can be found here.

Third party copyright refers to copyright that is owned by someone else. Legislation allows researchers to use short quotations, extracts or excerpts from others work as long as the use meets the requirements of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review’.  If researchers wish to reuse content they have authored but already published it is important to check if the publisher will permit this.

• Helps the creator be rewarded for their efforts
• Encourages creativity
• Leads to the creation of new material and advances knowledge

Single copy of a published work can be made for personal use to the following limits BUT you always need to cite anything that you use in your own work:

• One chapter of a book or extracts from a book to a maximum of 5% of the whole book
• One article of a journal issue
• One article from a single newspaper
• One paper from a set of conference proceedings
• One report of one case from a book of law reports
• Up to 5% of an anthology of short stories/poems OR one short story/poem if not more than 10 pages
• Up to 10% (if not more than 20 pages or 2 pages if brief) of a short book without chapters, report, pamphlet or standard paging
• Short excerpt from a musical work for study purposes but not performance

The intellectual work you create is covered by copyright when it appears in the written form. This includes

• Data
• Publications, including your thesis
• Presentations
• Posters

The University of Cambridge's policy means that copyright remains with the creator unless there are pre-existing conditions or the work has been created for University administration/managerial reasons.

This provides a way to licence the use of material you create and share. Using a simple formula it allows creators to build a licence which suits their needs and authorise appropriate use of their work. Using a Creative Commons licence allows researchers to get more exposure for their work whilst maintaining control over its use. These are the symbols that are used in licences.