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University of Bradford >> Library >> Plagiarism explained
The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarism as “the wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one’s own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas […] of another.” (Simpson, J. and Weiner, E. (eds). (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.)
What that means for you as a student at Bradford is:
Plagiarism is cheating in your academic assignments by using other people’s work without telling us that you are doing it, so that it looks as if you are the one who created the work. If you learn anything from a resource you read, you must show where you found it out from, even if you are not using exactly the same words as they wrote. You must be careful to give people credit for anything that they produce, for example:
You must always give credit to people who create, among others:
If you are using a website (or some other source) where no person is named as having written it, you must still acknowledge that you found the information on a website. Always make it clear to the person marking your assignment whether you are referring to your own work or that of someone else.
When you acknowledge the sources of your information, you will not just stay out of trouble. You will also gain marks by:
It also makes it possible for other people to follow up your area of research.
You can use other people's work for your course as long as you make it clear that you did not create it. As Isaac Newton wrote in a letter to Robert Hooke (5 Feb 1657) "If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants".
This sort of plagiarism is taking the exact words somebody else wrote, (in a website, a book, another student’s work, or any other source) and putting that into your assignment, without pointing out that you are using someone else’s words.
This sort of plagiarism means taking someone else’s writing and changing words here and there, or taking little bits of sentences, without pointing out that you are using someone else’s ideas and sentence structure.
Not making it obvious where you are drawing on somebody else’s work will be regarded as plagiarism. This includes:
If you use ideas from the same source several times in a piece of work, you should place a citation each time you use the source.
You must always do your assignments yourself. So:
Unless you are told to work in a group, you must work alone. If you want to talk to your friends about the work, do it before you start writing. The work you submit must be your own!
It is acceptable to:
Buying your assignment is the most severe form of plagiarism. If you are found to have purchased your assignment, you will usually be excluded from the University.
For more details on the penalties for buying assignments, consult the Breaches of Assessment Regulations: Academic Misconduct document.
Re-using work from a previous assignment without making it clear what you are doing deceives the lecturer who is marking this piece of work, and is regarded as plagiarism.
You can re-use previous work in the following ways:
You should NOT cut and paste large parts of a previous assignment into a new one.
Always make it clear when you are using somebody else’s work.
You need to point out in the body of your assignment every time you draw on something that you did not create or discover yourself, and separately give the full details of everything used so that your lecturer can find your sources. This is called “citing and referencing”. The Library has made available online guides to referencing for each subject.
Citing and referencing is an integral part of writing your assignments. Make sure you cite and reference every source you use while you are doing the writing. Do not think of it as a separate job and leave it until the end: you could end up missing some places where you need to cite, or running out of time to do it properly.
The headings below give some details on how you will need to do your work to make sure that you do not plagiarise.
When you are reading for an assignment, keep full records of all the things you use. This includes the author, title, page numbers and so on for books and the web address and so on for websites. Read the Library's guides on citing that tell you which details you need to write down.
Make it clear to yourself in your notes where each piece of information you are taking down comes from. That way, when you come to do your writing you will be able to put in the pointers that tell your lecturer where you found out everything.
The library has a lot of books on study skills for University students, which include how to make notes that will be effective in doing your writing. The LDU has created online guides on note-taking for you to consult.
Make sure that you give yourself enough time to find the sources you should be reading, read them thoroughly so that you understand them, do your own writing, and revise and change your work if you need to, without panicking. You will probably need more time than you think. The sort of reading and writing that you have to do at University level is different from what you have done before: you need to develop the skills for choosing trustworthy sources, scanning a source for information, reading critically and drawing on many pieces of information to write a logical assignment.
When reading, you need to make notes which include all of the information you will need to reference the source correctly. If you do this you will not have to find the source again when you are writing your assignment.
You also need to know that your lecturers have a lot of work to do and you will not always be able to get hold of them quickly. Do not leave it until near the deadline to ask them for comments on your work, or you might have no time for changes if they are needed.
The library has a number of books on study skills for University students, which include how to manage your time. The Learner Development Unit has online guides to time management.
If English is not your first language, it will take you longer to do your reading and writing, especially if you are also not used to the critical and analytical way that British universities expect you to read. The advisers in the Learner Development Unit and the Language Centre can help you come up with strategies to use your time well.
Using a reference is the way for you to acknowledge your use of other people's work. There are two parts to a reference:
More information on the practicalities of referencing is available from the Learner Development Unit.
Quoting is when you use the exact words of someone else’s work.
You must make it plain exactly which words you are quoting, and acknowledge the source that they came from.
Charts, diagrams, photographs, code, etc. from someone else’s work also count as direct quotes.
A quotation looks like this:
“Academic writing is not an uncomplicated task. It involves a wide range of different kinds of skills and if you are going to do it properly, it means that you have to know clearly what is required of you and how to deliver it.” (Moore, 2010, p 96.)
Notice the “ ” quotation marks telling us where the quoting starts and finishes.
(From Moore, S. (2010) The ultimate study skills handbook. Maidenhead: Open University Press.)
Paraphrasing takes place when you read someone else’s work, think about it, and rewrite or summarise it in your own words, keeping the facts and ideas of the original source.
It is considered good academic practice to paraphrase, because it shows you have understood the original work. Some departments want you to paraphrase anything you use and never to directly quote at all. You must acknowledge the source of anything you paraphrase or summarise, because you did not come up with the facts by yourself.
A paraphrase looks like this:
To succeed in academic writing, you need several different skills, including understanding what you are supposed to do. (Moore, 2010).
There are no quotation marks, but the source of the information is still shown.
(From Moore, S. (2010). The ultimate study skills handbook. Maidenhead: Open University Press.)
Remember: if you learn and subsequently use anything from a resource you have read you must acknowledge where it came from even if you are not using the same words as the original source.
In a nutshell, plagiarism is illegal and it is also:
There are two reasons why you need to give references for statistics, results from experiments, and other sources that are factual information. One reason is that somebody else did the work to discover and prove those facts, or did all the calculations to provide the statistics. If you do not reference, you look like you are trying to claim that you discovered this information yourself when in fact you simply read the results of someone else's work.
The other reason is about the reliability of whatever you are quoting. How does your lecturer know that the fact you are talking about is accurate? If you tell us where you found out this information, the person marking your work can look at the source of the data and be sure that it is a good academic source.
You still need to show that you are using something you did not originally create. You can put in the author’s name as “Unknown” or “Anonymous”. This includes imags, websites, statistics and computer code. You may also have a source where the author is an organisation, for instance, a report written by a government department. In these cases it is fine to use the organisation as an author.
Consider the following:
There are many websites that have been written to be freely used by people who need information. It is fine to use them, providing your lecturer is happy that they are good quality and reliable. However, you still found out the information from looking at the website, not by doing all the research yourself, so you need to point this out.
You must always give credit to people who create:
...or any other source from which you have used information.
This is called “secondary referencing”, and the referencing guide for your department will tell you how to do it. you need to acknowledge both the source you have read and the original source of the information.
But be careful! Particularly in science subjects, it is not a good idea to do this. You should always try to get hold of the original source and read it yourself. Without reading the original source, you cannot know if the discussion or summary you have read is reporting the original source correctly. For example, they might be leaving out details that are not important to them but matter for what you want to discuss.
Referencing guides for different subject areas are available online.
It is very unlikely that you will come up with exactly the same idea as somebody else. However:
“Common knowledge” is basic things that anybody might know and there is no need to say where you learnt it. It can be difficult to tell if something is “common knowledge” or not.
You do need to provide a reference to anything that you have taken information from. If you make a good try at a reference (following the pattern of how references generally work in your subject), you might lose a mark or two for not getting it exactly right, but if you leave the reference out you will definitely be concealing a source, which is a form of plagiarism.
Try to construct a reference for your source, giving enough information to enable your lecturer to trace the source.
Library guides for referencing are available online.
Always seek help from official University sources only, rather than your friends. Your Bradford degree will be taken by employers as proof you are fluent in English. We must ensure you are!
Try to manage your time carefully by:
Remember that it is better to get a bad mark for a poor piece of work than no mark for cheating.
Turnitin is a tool that:
Read more about Turnitin.
The University’s guideline is that you should generally be allowed to see a report on one draft before your final submission. The module co-ordinator will have created the correct settings for Turnitin when they set up the assignment submission link in Blackboard. Look in your handbook or ask the module co-ordinator to find out how to submit the draft and see the report.
Turnitin is not a plagiarism detector. It is a tool that helps your lecturers by showing parts of your assignments that use very similar words to other documents in their database. Your lecturer will look at the report and use their judgment to see if the number reflects a real problem with how you have done the assignment. For example, they will ignore groups of words that very commonly appear together (like "University of Bradford School of Social and International Studies"). Also, they look to see if you have pointed out that you are using somebody else’s work. It is acceptable to have a section in your assignment that is a quote from a website, a book or a source of any kind, providing that you reference it so that the lecturer knows it is a quote.
There is no set number that you have to aim for. A main reason for that is that different kinds of assignments work differently. For example, in a literature review, you are supposed to read and quote from a lot of different sources, but in a lab report, it is expected to be all about work you did yourself. You would expect to see a higher amount of similarities in the literature review than in the lab report.
Rather than worrying about percentages, it is more important to make sure that you are citing and referencing correctly, so that all the similarities are ones that you have pointed out as references. If you want to know more about Turnitin reports, ask the person who set the assignment (usually the module co-ordinator).
Follow these tips to maintain academic integrity and avoid plagiarism:
Citation and referencing guides
Learner Development Unit (LDU)
Imperial College have put together some explanations of what plagiarism means for different kinds of student from undergraduates to PhDs.
Leeds, London Met and Leicester Universities all have some online activities that you can work through:
Penalties for plagiarism depend on the amount which has been plagiarised and whether there are previous offences, but include:
You can find more details on the penalties for plagiarism on the Academic Quality Unit (AQU) web pages.
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