According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word plagiarize means: “to take and use as one's own (the thoughts, writings, or inventions of another person); to copy (literary work or ideas) improperly or without acknowledgement; (occasionally) to pass off as one's own the thoughts or work of (another).”Oxford University Press. 2000. Oxford English Dictionary. http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl.
The The Duke Community Standard describes it as follows: "Plagiarism occurs when a student, with intent to deceive or with reckless disregard for proper scholarly procedures, presents any information, ideas or phrasing of another as if they were his/her own and/or does not give appropriate credit to the original source. Proper scholarly procedures require that all quoted material be identified by quotation marks or indentation on the page, and the source of information and ideas, if from another, must be identified and be attributed to that source. Students are responsible for learning proper scholarly procedures."
Below you will find resources that help you keep track of your sources, so the you can incorporate them in your writing with the proper citation.
Citation tools allow you to save and organize your research. They also let you create formatted bibliographies.
A personal citation library designed to directly import references from multiple databases. In Refworks you can organize and manage your citations, share them with colleagues, and format bibliographies.
Downloadable as a standalone program or a Firefox extension, Zotero is designed to store content in any format, including PDFs, images, audio and video files, and snapshots of web pages. Zotero operates with thousands of sites, and automatically indexes your library for ease of access.
Downloadable as a standalone program from OIT, EndNote is a powerful citation tool for organizing your research and creating formatted citations. In addition to the standalone option, you can create an EndNote Web account.
Example MLA Article Citation (Click to Enlarge)
| Common elements of an article citation |
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Example MLA Book Citation (Click to Enlarge)
| Common elements of a book citation |
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When you write a research paper, your professor will tell you how to format your paper by pointing you to a style guide. Here are the most common style guides:
You can find more information about style guides at Purdue OWL, a website dedicated to helping researchers with questions about style guides.
