Sources: About Citing Sources: What is Plagiarism?

Table of contents

About citing sources

Why acknowledge sources?

When to cite sources

What is plagiarism?

REGARDLESS OF INTENT, the failure to provide proper acknowledgment of your use of another's work constitutes plagiarism. The Academic Honor Principle, which you agreed to respect when you matriculated at Dartmouth College, specifically prohibits plagiarism and other acts of academic dishonesty. The Student Handbook states that:

Any form of plagiarism violates the Academic Honor Principle. Plagiarism is defined as the submission or presentation of work, in any form, that is not a student's own, without acknowledgment of the sources.

With specific regard to papers a simple rule dictates when it is necessary to acknowledge sources. If a student obtains information or ideas from an outside source, that source must be acknowledged. Another rule to follow is that any direct quotation must be placed in quotation marks, and the source immediately cited. ¹

Plagiarism can occur whenever you make use of the ideas or work product of someone else without including an appropriate citation. The guidelines described in this booklet apply to all kinds of your scholarly work: essays, examinations, oral reports, homework assignments, laboratory reports, computer programs, music scores, Web pages, choreography, graphical depictions, visual representations, and so on. Plagiarism is possible with any formal work performed in any medium and in any scholarly discipline.
To avoid the most common forms of inadvertent plagiarism, you should develop the habit of citing sources not only when you execute the final draft of a scholarly project but also as you take any preliminary notes for it.

FOLLOWING are several typical examples of plagiarized work. The plagiarizer has used words or ideas taken from the following two paragraphs that appear in Caroline Spurgeon's critical work, Shakespeare's Imagery:

The main image in Othello is that of animals in action, preying upon one another, mischievous, lascivious, cruel or suffering, and through these, the general sense of pain and unpleasantness is much increased and kept constantly before us.

More than half the animal images in the play are Iago's, and all these are contemptuous or repellent: a plague of flies, a quarrelsome dog, the recurrent image of bird-snaring, leading asses by the nose, a spider catching a fly, beating an offenceless dog, wild cats, wolves, goats and monkeys. ²

Plagiarism by unacknowledged verbatim quotation:

The majority of the animal images in the play are Iago's, and all of these are contemptuous or repellent. He refers to a plague of flies, a quarrelsome dog, bird-snaring, leading asses by the nose, a spider catching a fly, beating an offenceless dog, wild cats, goats and monkeys. Through these images the general sense of pain and unpleasantness is increased and kept constantly before us.

Note that this paragraph duplicates Spurgeon's passage with only slight rearrangement and restatement, and without using appropriate quotation marks or providing a citation at the end.

Plagiarism by mosaic or mixing paraphrase and unacknowledged quotation:

I believe that the main image in Shakespeare's tragedy, Othello, is that of animals. These creatures are constantly in action, preying upon one another, and they are depicted as mischievous, wanton, cruel or suffering. By Shakespeare's ingenious use of these animal images, the general sense of pain and unpleasantness that pervades the entire story is much increased and kept constantly before the reader.

Note how in this case the plagiarist intermingles his or her own original writing with unmarked, uncited excerpts and phrases drawn directly from Spurgeon.

Plagiarism by unacknowledged paraphrase and/or use of ideas:

In Othello, Shakespeare makes frequent use of animal imagery. The specific images he uses are generally distasteful and convey to the reader a constant impression of conflict and misery.

Note that although this excerpt does not make literal use of Spurgeon's paragraphs, it nevertheless draws its ideas from them without any acknowledgment and thus constitutes an act of plagiarism on a par with the two preceding examples.

Plagiarism of nontextual materials:

Directly using items like a published map, a chart, a statistical table, a musical score, a Web page, or someone else's experiment or computer routine without acknowledging your source amounts to the same act of plagiarism as quoting from another's text without using quotation marks and citing the quotation's source. Modifying or transposing certain aspects of such items without acknowledging your source amounts to the same act of plagiarism as not acknowledging your rearrangement of stylistic or thematic elements from another person's text. Taking full credit for the results of someone else's technical labor or procedures amounts to the same act of plagiarism as paraphrasing without acknowledging an idea not held by you before reading someone else's work.

Other forms of plagiarism:

Dartmouth's Academic Honor Principle also states that a student may not use the same work in more than one course: "Submission of the same work in more than one course without the prior approval of all professors responsible for the courses violates the Academic Honor Principle." The Student Handbook states that:

The intent of this rule is that a student should not receive academic credit more than once for the same work product without permission. The rule is not intended to regulate repeated use of an idea or a body of learning developed by the student, but rather the identical formulation and pre-sentation of that idea. Thus the same paper, computer program, research project, or other academic work product should not be submitted in more than one course (whether in identical or rewritten form) without first obtaining the permission of all professors responsible for the courses involved. Students with questions about the application of this rule in a specific case should seek faculty advice. ³

Likewise, in many foreign language and literature courses, students may not ask anyone other than the professor of their course to re-read or correct essays written in a foreign language. Students must rely on their judgment and conscience to determine whether a specific question might be addressed to a classmate or a teaching assistant (e.g., help with an idiom or a rare irregular verb not readily available in a dictionary); in such a case, any such aid must be minimal, occasional, and acknowledged.

1	Dartmouth College, Student Handbook (Hanover, 1997) 147.
2	Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1935) 335.
3	Student Handbook 147.