Avoiding Plagiarism

Plagiarism is "the action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft" (Oxford English Dictionary online, 2006). To avoid plagiarizing and maintain your academic integrity, you should:

• Give credit when you use other people's content in your academic work.

• Make sure your assignments and exams are entirely your own original work. 

Plagiarism can take many forms, and is one of many forms of academic integrity violation.  These may be intentional or unintentional, and may involve a whole assignment or part of an assignment. 

Examples of plagiarism: 

• Imporper use of quotations, by copying something word for word but not using quotation marks, whether or not you provide a citation

• Using significant ideas and concepts from someone else without a citation-even if you put  into your own words 

• Paraphrasing too closely by making only small changes to a passage, still retaining the same structure and words as the original 

• Citing a source you didn't actually read 

• Submitting a paper written by someone else (including if purchased) 

• Copying and pasting from an AI output

• Stealing or "borrowing" all or part of someone else's work (even if you have the author's permission)

• Cobbling together a paper by copying and pasting from different sources

• Submitting the same or a similar assignment more than once for credit 

• Having someone else edit your work, or using AI tools to substantially re-write your work  

Take steps to avoid plagiarism:

1. Take careful, organized notes:  Clearly mark passages you copy word-for-word, those you paraphrase and those that are you own thoughts. Some people use a Q (for 'quote'), P (for paraphrase) and M (for 'mine') to do this.  

2. Know how and when to cite, and cite properly. A citation management tool such as Zotero is very helpful. 

3. Paraphrase carefully, to synthesize and integrete ideas. 

4. Use direct quotes sparingly, where they provide real impact. 

5. Provide a citation for all words and ideas from other authors, in the appropriate style for your course of disipline. 

Citing is required for non-text ideas too - cite words, statistics, ideas, or images from any source. 

You don't need to cite your own ideas, thoughts and observations. You don't need to cite images that you created (unless created with AI tools, and you can still give yourself attribution for original works).  You can assess 'common knowledge' or 'known facts' to decide if they need a citation (often not, if you feel they really are common knowledge). 

For details about academic expectations at UVic, see UVic's  resources on academic integrity.

UVic's policy on academic integrity provides more information about the consequences of plagiarism and other forms of cheating.  If you want to find out more about academic integrity, complete the self-paced resource Integrity Matters.