Avoiding
plagiarism
The following discussions are
taken from Writing at Yale, Alfred E. Guy,
Jr., and Suzanne Young, the Yale College Writing Center.
The first, on why we cite sources, is meant to help
you understand the ethical and intellectual issues that
underlie the imperative for proper citation. The following
sections provide basic guidelines for avoiding plagiarism.
Principles of Citing Sources
When you have questions
about specific instances of using sources, we suggest
you review these general principles about why scholars
acknowledge each other’s
work.
To Reflect the Intellectual Context
Citing your sources demonstrates your participation
in a larger conversation about the topic at hand.
If there’s one fundamental misunderstanding
that many student writers have about acknowledging
sources, it’s that doing so will lessen the
impact of their own contribution. In nearly every
case, the effect will be the opposite. Academic scholarship,
at its heart, is about the interplay of ideas. Most
professors will be much more impressed with your
reflection on a pithy quotation than they would be
by your turning a pithy phrase itself. Your sources
also convey information about the intellectual context
of your research. Although the content of a quotation
is what’s most important, the very sources
of the ideas or information you use will help an
educated reader understand the implications of your
argument. You might get similar information about
how a curveball works from a physics textbook or
from Tom Seaver’s autobiography, but each of
these citations lends a different tone to your own
ideas.
To Lead Us to Further Research
Academics conceive scholarship as an ongoing and
collaborative enterprise. Rather than try to invent
a field from scratch, we read what others have discovered
and try to build on or extend it in our own work.
One scholar’s
sources can therefore be an invaluable contribution
to another’s research. So while we read your
work looking for your original ideas, we also want
help knowing how to pursue related questions and problems.
In this way, acknowledging your sources raises the
value of your paper inestimably, as it shows readers
where they might look to test, explore, and extend
your conclusions.
To
Give Credit Where it’s Due
Most students are familiar with this reason for citing
sources: just as you want credit for your writing and
ideas, other writers deserve credit for their work.
For one thing, recognition is often the only or the
primary reward for scholarship, which is not generally
a very high-paying line of work. But this economic
analogy misses the deeper reason for giving credit.
The very project of a university education consists
of joining an ongoing conversation about ideas that
began in Antiquity. You absolutely cannot participate
in this exchange if you pass someone else’s words
off as your own. Mechanically, it takes only the slightest
change to acknowledge your source and then comment
on its ideas: add quotation marks and mention the name
and you’re in business. But these small additions
are what distinguish mere copyists from intellectuals.
Warning!!
When must you cite?
ALWAYS CITE, in the following cases:
1) When you quote two or more words verbatim, or even
one word if it is used in a way that is unique to the
source. Explanation
2) When you introduce facts that you have found in
a source. Explanation
3) When you paraphrase or summarize ideas, interpretations,
or conclusions that you find in a source. For more
explanation, see Fair Paraphrase.
4) When you
introduce information that is not common knowledge
or that may be considered common knowledge in your
field, but the reader may not know it. For more information,
see Common Knowledge.
5) When you borrow the plan or structure of a larger
section of a source’s
argument (for example, using a theory from a source
and analyzing the same three case studies that the
source uses). Explanation
6) When you build on another’s
method found either in a source or from collaborative
work in a lab. Explanation
7) When you build on another’s
program in writing computer code or on a not-commonly-known
algorithm. Explanation
8) When you
collaborate with others in producing knowledge. Explanation
EXPLANATIONS
1)
When you quote two or more words verbatim, or even
one word if it is used in a way that is unique to the
source.
Most
writers realize that they must acknowledge a source
when quoting a memorable phrase or sentence. They’d be sure to credit Mark Twain when quoting: “The
coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” And
you probably also understand that you do not need to
cite words that are very common to your topic. When
writing about Hamlet, you do not need to put the words “Hamlet” or “Shakespeare” in
quotation marks, or cite a source for them, even though
you may have read sources that use these words. But
when a single word or two are used in a distinctive
way, so that the author is creating a new concept or
applying it to a new topic, you must give acknowledge
the source. When John Baker redefines the significance
of the mirror test by saying that chimpanzees’ awareness
of their reflection is not full consciousness, but
a limited “kinesthetic self-concept,” it’s
clear that those two words, as specialized terms of
art, should appear in quotation marks in your paper.
Even though neither “kinesthetic” nor “self-concept” is
unusual on its own, as a phrase they belong to the
author. But even a single, non-specialist term—such
as “consilience”—may become tied
to an author (in this case, E.O. Wilson) through an
influential publication, in which case you should put
the single word in quotation marks, at least in your
first mention of it in your text.
2) When you introduce facts that you have found in
a source.
Facts that are generally accessible (the date of the
Declaration of Independence, for instance) need not
be cited to a particular source, but once you go up
one level of detail on the information ladder, you
probably need to cite the source (the number of people
who signed the Declaration, for instance). And note
that commonly known facts found in a particular or
unusual context should be cited, so that the reader
knows how your argument may have been influenced by
the context in which you found it. For more, see Common
Knowledge.
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3) When
you paraphrase or summarize ideas, interpretations,
or conclusions that you find in a source. For more
explanation, see Fair Paraphrase.
4) When
you introduce information that is not common knowledge
or that may be considered common knowledge in your
field, but the reader may not know it. For
more information, see Common
Knowledge.
5)
When you borrow the plan or structure of a larger
section of a source’s
argument (for example, using a theory from a source
and analyzing the same three case studies that the
source uses).
You
may not be used to thinking of the plan of a source
as proprietary to its author, but if you follow a
source’s
plan too closely without acknowledging that you saw
it there first, you’re presenting as your own
an analysis that someone else shaped. For example,
if use Mark Hauser’s discussion of primates’ knowledge
of other minds from Wild Minds and you discuss the
same three experiments that he analyzes, then you must
acknowledge this debt. The simplest way to do this
is to say “Like Mark Hauser, I find the three
experiments carried out by X, Y, and Z groups to be
useful in considering the extent of chimpanzee awareness.” An
even better way—because it highlights your distinctiveness
as a writer—is to distinguish the different use
to which you will put the analysis. If, for instance,
you’re focusing on primate social skills rather
than strictly on their awareness of other minds, you
might write: “Mark Hauser examines three experiments
carried out by X, Y, and Z for what they can tell us
about knowledge of other minds. For my purposes, though,
these same experiments shed important light on the
social capacities of primates.” These statements
can come in a discursive footnote or in the main body,
although if the statement distinguishes your argument
from the source’s, it has an important role in
the body of the argument.
See
Gordon Harvey, Writing With
Sources, Chapter 3, for
an excellent discussion of unfair borrowing of another’s
plan.
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6)
When you build on another’s
method found either in a source or from collaborative
work in a lab.
Relying
on someone’s research method is like
#5 above—borrowing a text’s plan or structure.
If your approach to a problem is inspired by someone
else’s work on a similar or analogous case, credit
the original researcher. Building on the work of others
is appropriate and desirable, but methods, like specific
words and phrases, are a form of intellectual property.
7)
When you build on another’s
program or on a not-commonly-known algorithm in writing
computer code.
Although
writing code may seem different from writing papers,
the same standards of acknowledgment apply. If you
rely on someone else’s program, you must
credit that person. Some software algorithms are so
well known that they rise to the level of Common Knowledge.
Programmers use such pieces of code without acknowledgement.
But if the code is not well known, someone reading
your program might think you’ve authored parts
that are borrowed. For a useful example of unauthorized
code borrowing, see this page of the Princeton University website.
8) When you collaborate with others in producing knowledge.
You may sometimes co-author a paper or other text
during college; these opportunities are often more
frequent in the professional world. When two or more
people all contribute substantially to a piece, they
normally list all their names as authors. But there
are also occasions when someone gives help that does
not rise to the level of co-authorship. If you work
with a lab partner to set up an experiment, for instance,
but run and analyze the results yourself, you should
credit the lab partner in a footnote or by reference
within your paper. Similarly, if you and a partner
present a scene from a play, and you later write a
paper using some of the insights you gained during
production, you should credit the other actor.
University
life is structured so that your ideas will receive
constant testing and refinement in discussion with
others. You do not need to cite in your papers every
conversation you have about the ideas or evidence.
But you do need to develop a judgment about which
conversations are incidental and which result in
ideas that merit reference in your texts. If you
take this warning as an opportunity, and make an
effort to reveal the trail of your thinking in footnotes
and acknowledgements, you’ll soon develop a
sense of how to credit collaboration appropriately.
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The Importance of Fair Paraphrase
One of the decisions you
need to make when engaging with a source is whether
to quote the source’s
language directly or to paraphrase it in your own words.
Restating a source’s idea in your
own words may not seem too difficult, but offering
a paraphrase that distinguishes your voice from the
source’s voice and furthers your own argument
is actually rather challenging. Below are three examples
of an attempt to paraphrase the passage from Dennett’s
Consciousness Explained.
The first and second are
examples of plagiarism because they both blur the
line between the writer’s
voice and the source idea. The first alters the original
without changing its form or content. The second retains
long phrases verbatim from the original. Only the third
example is an effective and fair paraphrase: The writer
marks the boundaries between her voice and the source’s
voice, and she puts the source’s idea to work
in service of her own argument. Reading these examples
should help you to see how to make paraphrase an effective
strategy for building an argument grounded in sources.
Below is the original passage
as it appears on page 39 of Daniel Dennett’s
Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
Almost all researchers
in cognitive science, whether they consider themselves
neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial intelligence
researchers, tend to postpone questions about consciousness
by restricting their attention to the “peripheral” and “subordinate” systems
of the mind/brain, which are deemed to feed and service
some dimly imagined “center” where “conscious
thought” and “experience” take place.
This tends to have the effect of leaving too much of
the mind’s work to be done “in the center,” and
this leads theorists to underestimate the “amount
of understanding” that must be accomplished by
the relatively peripheral systems of the brain. For
instance, theorists tend to think of perceptual systems
as providing “input” to some central
thinking arena, which in turn provides “control” or “direction” to
some relatively peripheral systems governing bodily
motion. This central arena is thought to avail itself
of material held in various relatively subservient
systems of memory. But the very idea that there are
important theoretical divisions between such presumed
subsystems as “long-term memory” and “reasoning,” (or “planning”)
is more an artifact of the divide-and-conquer strategy
than anything found in nature.
Paraphrase 1
Most
cognitive scientists, whether they are neuroscientists
or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers,
tend to avoid questions about consciousness by focusing
mainly on peripheral and subordinate systems of the
mind/brain, which are thought to assist a mysterious
center where consciousness and subjective experience
happen. The effect of this is to leave too much of
the mind’s
work for the center, and this means that theorists
understate how much understanding must be done by
the outer systems of the brain (Dennett 39).
Paraphrase 2
The
problem with cognitive science today is that researchers
focus on the peripheral and subordinate systems of
the mind/brain without clarifying how these are connected
to the brain’s center, the place where conscious
thought and experience take place. The result is that
they leave too much of the mind’s work to be
done in some dimly imagined “center.” This
fuzziness about whether there is a control center leads
them to underplay the mind’s work that must be
accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems of
the brain (Dennett 39).
Paraphrase 3
Dennett points out
that when theorists take a “divide-and
conquer” strategy by focusing narrowly on a given
subsystem of the brain/mind, their theoretical models
implicitly assume a center of consciousness that has
not been proven to exist. By leaving in place the Cartesian
notion of a control center, the models may underestimate
the work that these supposedly “peripheral” systems
perform (39).
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Paraphrase 1
Cosmetic changes don’t cut it: The writer of
this Paraphrase 1 has plagiarized from the original
because she has simply replaced the words of the original
with synonymous words and phrases, instead of rewriting
the key ideas in her own words. She takes the structure
of the original for her own, including the phrasing
of the original’s sentences (the same introductory
and main clause structures) and the overall movement
from sentence to sentence. This kind of cosmetic changing
that leaves the original intact is unacceptable.
Dennett: “Almost
all researchers in cognitive science, whether
they consider themselves neuroscientists or psychologists
or artificial intelligence researchers,
tend to postpone questions
about consciousness by
restricting their attention to the “peripheral” and “subordinate” systems
of the mind/brain, which
are deemed to feed and service some dimly imagined “center” where “conscious
thought” and “experience” take
place.”
Paraphrase 1: “Most
cognitive scientists, whether
they are neuroscientists or psychologists or artificial
intelligence researchers,
tend to avoid questions about
consciousness by focusing
mainly on peripheral and subordinate systems of the
mind/brain, which are
thought to assist a mysterious center where
consciousness and subjective experience happen.”
Why (good)
paraphrase is important: If you need to stay close to the original,
then quote the passage directly. It is often the
case, however, that you do not need to include all
the information from the original in your own essay.
If you do not need all the information in the original,
do a fair paraphrase that represents the essence
of the original’s idea, but leaves
out what is unnecessary to your own project. For example,
it is unlikely that, in your own argument, you need
to include the list “neuroscientists or psychologists
or artificial intelligence researchers”; these
titles are part of Dennett’s particular argument
(he’s trying to say something about how widespread
he thinks this phenomenon is in the sciences). A fair,
careful paraphrase allows you to incorporate the essence
of a source’s insight without also incorporating
the author’s peripheral claims or comments that
don’t relate to your argument.
Signal
the shift from your own voice to the source’s:
The reader assumes that any word or phrase that is
not in quotation marks represents your own thinking,
unless you signal otherwise. Imagine the faulty paraphrase
dropped into a larger paragraph from the writer’s
essay and you’ll see how the reader could move
from the writer’s argument right into Dennett’s
idea without even knowing that a transition in voice
had taken place. This is because the writer has not
signaled the shift to another’s voice. The only
ways to signal this are: a) to quote directly, in which
case the quotation marks signal the shift; or b) to
announce through a signal phrase that the subsequent
idea (though paraphrased in your own words) belongs
to someone else: “Dennett points out that when
theorists . . .” Always mark the boundary between
your own voice and the voice/idea of the source with
such a signal phrase. You should also give the page
number from which your paraphrase came, but this doesn’t
absolve you of the need to represent the idea in your
own words and signal the shift in voice from your own
to the source’s.
Paraphrase 2
Using un-cited language
from the original to create a patchwork is plagiarism:
It may be more difficult to see why Paraphrase 2
is plagiarism. After all, the writer has indicated
many of Dennett’s distinctive
words and phrases with quotation marks. But as shown
below, the writer of Paraphrase 2 has taken phrases
verbatim from the original, rearranged them somewhat,
and woven them into the fabric of her own writing—without
attributing them to the source. This is called “mosaic” or “patchwork” plagiarism.
It does not matter that more of this phrasing is her
own than was the case in Paraphrase 1; she has still
borrowed significant patches of direct language from
Dennett without attribution. Remember that using more
than two words in a row from a source without attribution
is considered plagiarism.
Dennett: “Almost all researchers in cognitive
science, whether they consider themselves neuroscientists
or psychologists or artificial intelligence researchers,
tend to postpone questions about consciousness by restricting
their attention to the “peripheral” and “subordinate” systems
of the mind/brain, which are deemed to feed and service
some dimly imagined “center” where “conscious
thought” and “experience” take place.
This tends to have the effect of leaving too
much of the mind’s work to be done “in the center,” and
this leads theorists to underestimate the “amount
of understanding” that must
be accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems
of the brain.”
Paraphrase 2: The problem
with cognitive science today is that researchers
focus on the peripheral and
subordinate systems of the mind/brain without clarifying how these are connected
to the brain’s center, the place
where conscious thought and
experience take place.
The result is that they leave too
much of the mind’s
work to be done in some
dimly imagined “center.” This
fuzziness about whether there is a control center leads
them to underplay the mind’s work that must
be accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems
of the brain (Dennett 39).
If you
don’t use quotation marks, you imply
that the language is your own: Although the writer’s
rephrasing of the source’s idea suggests that
she has a better understanding of it than did the writer
of Paraphrase 1, she is still far too close to the
original. In order for this to be a legitimate paraphrase,
the writer would need to restate the core of the idea
in her own words and to craft sentences with a new
structure. Even though Paraphrase 2 cites Dennett,
the fact that there are no quotation marks leads the
reader to think that this is the writer’s own
language. The key principle to remember is that where
you do not use quotation marks, the reader assumes
that you are the author of all the words in your paper.
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Paraphrase 3
Take the pith of the original: Paraphrase 3 is a strong
and fair paraphrase because it captures the essence
of Dennett’s idea—that scientists still
assume a “control center” in their research—in
the writer’s own words. The sentence structure
and flow from sentence to sentence is unique to the
writer, rather than following the original too closely.
Paraphrase 3 is also shorter than the original—another
good sign, since an effective paraphrase takes the
pith of the original and leaves behind secondary
commentary or asides in the original source.
Signal
the boundaries between your voice and the source’s
voice: In Paraphrase 3, the writer has carefully signaled
the place where the source’s idea begins and
ends, so that if we imagine this paraphrase in a larger
paragraph of the writer’s own, we would have
no doubt about the boundaries between the two voices.
Own the
material: Paraphrase
3, through its analytical confidence, shows that
the writer truly understands the original and is
making use of it. Instead of slavishly following
the original, she has assimilated the idea into her
own thinking and transformed it through that understanding.
The writer of Paraphrase 3 is using her restatement
of Dennett’s idea as an occasion
to further her own idea about how our conventional
notion of consciousness needs to change. This paraphrase
is pointed in a direction—the direction of the
writer’s argument. We can see this in the way
that the writer has distilled the original for her
own purposes. And we can also see it in the heightened
language of the phrase “supposedly ‘peripheral’ systems,” the
dynamic signal phrase “Dennett points out,” and
in the writer’s use of her own keyterms, all
of which alert us to the writer’s point of view.
Use keyterms
to translate the source’s idea
into your essay’s idiom: The writer of Paraphrase
3 introduces a term (“divide-and-conquer”)
that Dennett uses earlier in the book chapter as a
useful metaphor to capture the idea for the reader.
And she has introduced a term of her own—“Cartesian
notion of a control center”—that is informed
by, but not unique to, Dennett’s discussion.
A strong paraphrase uses the writer’s own keyterms—keyterms
that have appeared earlier in the essay and will reappear
after the paraphrase—to summarize the core of
the source so that the reader understands how Dennett’s
idea contributes to the writer’s unfolding argument.
These keyterms help the reader to line up the source
idea alongside the other ideas the writer has already
introduced into her argument. They contribute to the
overall sense that the writer’s ideas are developing
in relation to, not separately from, the source’s
ideas.
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Common Knowledge (or knowing when to cite)
If you are familiar with
the notion of “common
knowledge” from earlier writing experiences,
you may have noticed that its definition is easy to
state, but can be hard to apply in a particular case.
The “common” way to talk about common knowledge
is to say that it is knowledge that most educated people
know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary.
Thus, you might not know the date of the most recent
meeting of the Federal Reserve, but you can find it
out quite easily. Further, the term “common knowledge” carries
the sense of “communal” knowledge—it
is community information that no particular individual
can fairly claim to own. One sign that something is
community knowledge is that it is stated in 5 or more
sources. So, if it’s known to educated people,
or can be easily looked up, or appears in many sources,
it is likely to be “common knowledge” and
so does not need to be cited.
But here is where things
become tricky: As you write papers in college and
move deeper into your field of study, what counts
as common knowledge becomes much less clear. Within
a given discipline, there is a body of common knowledge
that an outsider (even an educated college student
who doesn’t happen to be in your
field) might not know. For example, within psychology,
it is common knowledge that chimpanzees recognize themselves
in a mirror; in literature, it is common knowledge
that James Joyce is a major modernist author. In referring
to the mirror test or calling James Joyce a modernist,
you wouldn’t need to cite anyone. But as soon
as you begin to say something, for instance, about
what the results of the mirror test mean for a model
of consciousness, you would need to cite a source.
The point, then, is to think about your audience: What
has been said in the class or repeated in textbooks
and other sources often enough to suggest that it is
common knowledge within the discipline?
Because the notion of “common knowledge” is
ambiguous and depends on context, you should always
check with a professor or TF if you have any doubts.
Some reference books will say “if in doubt, cite
it,” but you don’t want to over-cite, so
check with your readers to try to fix the line between
common and specialized knowledge.
Sometimes you become so
conversant in a subject that you can explain complex
theories, methodolologies, or historical timelines
without reference to a source. You may notice this
phenomenon as you research and write your senior
essay. At this point, you’re
becoming an expert in the field and things may start
to seem obvious to you that are not obvious to an intelligent
lay reader. You will want to check with your department
about the level of expertise you’re expected
to assume; you may also want to show your writing to
a Residential College Writing Tutor, a Writing Partner,
or a friend who’s a good reader. As a senior
essay writer, you will probably need to cite less than
you used to, but more than you may think.
This advice about “common knowledge” is
true for all disciplines—think about your audience
and the course attitude, recognize when you’re
writing as an expert, and always check with professors
if you’re in doubt. The sciences, however, have
a somewhat different notion of “common knowledge,” coming
partly out of research practice and partly out of more
collaborative work methods. Ideas, findings, and methodologies
that are new knowledge (and therefore specialized rather
than common knowledge) become old knowledge more quickly
in the sciences. The answer, again, is to consider
the messages you’re getting from the course about
what concepts are common or foundational, and to check
in with professors or TFs.
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