IL Tutorial: Plagiarism

According to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, plagiarism is the act of passing off the ideas or words of someone else as your own. Or to use a more familiar phrase, when you plagiarize you are not "giving credit where credit is due".

Whenever you do research, you will study what others have published on a subject and form you own opinion or conclusion. In your assignments you may want to use what you find in books or articles or web pages to support your own point of view. When you do, you will need to acknowledge or credit the original author or source.

Not to do so is not only dishonest, but also illegal; you violate copyright law when you use someone's words or ideas without proper credit. You are stealing that person's property, their intellectual property.

You need to give credit when you:

• Quote any phrase or passage word for word. Use quotation marks " " to enclose the quote at the "beginning and at the end".
• Paraphrase (put in your own words) the ideas, theories or opinions of someone else. Read the examples under the section called Recognizing Unacceptable and Acceptable Paraphrases.  
• Use any facts, statistics, visuals - any bits of information - that are not common knowledge. Common knowledge refers to facts that are generally known and easily verfied or proven. These statements are common knowledge: Boston is the capital of Massachusetts, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008.

If you have any doubts about whether a statement in common knowledge or not, cite the source.

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