Plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty (such as cheating on an exam) are serious offenses, and will be treated accordingly!

Dishonesty on an exam, including willingly giving information to someone else during an exam, will result in assigment of a zero on the exam of the student(s) involved.

If a paper is turned in which contains plagiarized material of any sort, that paper will receive a grade of zero.

What is Plagiarism?

We all know that taking someone else's work and representing it as your own (or using something someone else wrote for you or sold to you as your own) is plagiarism.     However, there are a number of less blatant ways in which one can (sometimes unwittingly) commit plagiarism.

When writing a paper, especially on a scientific topic, it is tempting to incorporate some of the "jargon" from a reference souce, rather than to try to put the jargon in your own words.     For example, I once had a student who used the phrase "distal paresthesia" when writing about the clinical symptoms of Lyme disease.     This was clearly a case of plagiarism, because it was clear to me that this student had no idea what "distal paresthesia" means!    When using references in which you encounter a word or phrase whose meaning you do not know, look it up in a dictionary!     When writing the paper, either use the more common meaning of the term or, if you must use the jargon, define it the first time you use it:   e.g., " . . . distal paresthesia, which is loss of feeling in the extremities."     Failure to do so is plagiarism!

All too often, I find a sentence or paragraph in a student paper with a single citation at the end of the sentence or paragraph, by which the student is really indicating that many of the phrases in this sentence or paragraph were taken almost word for word from that source.     Even though there is a reference cited for the paragraph, this is plagiarism because it is basically an unattributed quotation.   If you use a string of words from a reference source, it belongs in quotation marks, with the reference citation immediately following the quote.     If you paraphrase a source only slightly (for example, by changing a few words or omitting part of a sentence), you are committing unintended plagiarism, even if you cite the source from which the information came, because you are really using a modified quote that is not marked as such.    Bottom line, when writing a reference paper, it is important to put ideas into your own words, and minimize the use of phrases that should be treated as quotations from the refefrence sources.

If you write a sentence or paragraph in which you cite specific data or results from a publication, the reference source should be cited "as soon as possible".     If you are using numerical superscripts^x, you can put the superscript right after the cited information.     If you are using "in text citations" (name, date of publication), put the citation at the end of the sentence.

If you are in doubt about whether someting might be plagiarism, ask me!