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Study Skills

Wolfson College Academic Skills: Plagiarism

Help with finding, managing and using information from the Wolfson Library Team.

Plagiarism is using ideas or the work of another person and presenting it as your own work. This guide provides some information to help you find out more about what it is and how to avoid it. However, definitive guidance will come from your department and the University. Always check this if you are in any doubt about what constitutes plagiarism.

Top tips

  1. Plagiarism 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 also includes the use of AI. The University of Cambridge has made the following statement: "Content produced by AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, does not represent the student’s own original work so would be considered a form of academic misconduct to be dealt with under the University's disciplinary procedures."
  2. 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mathematical derivations, computer code, material downloaded from websites, drawn from manuscripts, published and unpublished material including lecture handouts and other students' work.

  3. 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.

  4. Find out how correctly give credit to authors by finding your department on the Cambridge Libraries Reference Management Guide. This takes you to discipline-specific information about references. The are other great tools such as Cite Them Right and Zoterobib to help you automatically generate a citation in your departmental style.
  5. 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.

These two short presentations give an overview of what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. The second video focuses on referencing as one way to ensure that you give appropriate credit to authors that you have used to inform and develop your argument.

How to

Try it out

Now that you have a sense of what differentiates bad academic practice from good academic practice, we encourage you to test your understanding by taking our online Avoiding Plagiarism tutorial. Our tutorial aims to clarify what constitutes the different forms of plagiarism and what you can to do avoid it. We strongly recommend that you read this and take the quizzes before starting your course or anytime you need to reinforce your knowledge regarding plagiarism. If you feel unsure about any aspect of this tutorial, then you can arrange to speak to your supervisor, get clarification from your department, or meet with a librarian to get more advice before you start submitting work.

FALSE. Information and content that is not your own work needs to be referenced regardless of whether it is published or not. This includes your own work as well. Referencing acknowledges the original work and is good academic practice. See our section on referencing for more information.

 

The University has put together a series of pages on Plagiarism and Academic Misconduct. Look at them in detail if you have any doubts about what constitutes plagiarism. They include:

Find out more

Find out how correctly give credit to authors by reading our Referencing tab.

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.

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