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Plagiarism: Tips for Avoiding Plagiarism

This guide provides tips on what constitutes plagiarism as well as tutorials and tips on methods to improve your research skills.

Respecting Others

Respect the intellectual sweat of others. This means giving credit for work that is not your own and ensuring you cite others' works both within, and at the end, of your paper or project" (The Center for Intellectual Property).

Using an author's exact words

  • Use quotation marks around all words copied from a source.
  • Choose to quote an author's exact words when the phrasing is unique or strengthens your argument.
  • Provide a citation for the source of the exact words you used immediately after the quotation (Trivedi and Williams).

Quoting, Paraphrasing, Summarizing

  • Check out the descriptions, tips and examples of these three terms at the Purdue OWL website . The goal here is to make you familiar with what distinguishes each of these techniques.

Borrowing Information

  • Cite the source when borrowing a figure, graph, map, data, or table from another author's work.
  • The original source must be cited even if the borrowed information is used for different purposes than those intended in the original source.
  • If you organize your ideas in the same fashion in which an author organized his or her ideas, cite the source of the organizational scheme (Trivedi and Williams).

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