Plagiarism
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the use of another person’s work without acknowledgment. Examples include:
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direct duplication, by copying (or allowing to be copied) another's work. This includes copying from a book article, web site, or another student's assignment;
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paraphrasing another person’s work with minor changes, but keeping the meaning, form and/or progression of ideas of the original;
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piecing together sections of the work of others into a new whole;
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submitting an assignment (or part of an assignment) that has already been submitted for assessment in another subject;
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presenting an assignment as independent work when it has been produced in whole or part in collusion with other people, for example, another student or a tutor.
Basic rules to avoid plagiarism
You must cite the source of information in the body of any essay or assignment (either as a numbered footnote/endnote or as an in-text reference) and list the cited source in your list of references. To do this properly, you need to be careful about recording the source of each note that you make, whatever the source, be it a book, a journal, a film or TV documentary, or a source on the Internet.
Each note you take should include certain basic information which enables another person to identify correctly and locate that source and the origin of your quote or data cited. The methods varies for different types of sources. In the first reference to any type of item you must give a description sufficient to identify it.
This requires:
For books: Author (full name), Title of book (underlined or in italics), the edition (if not the first), Place and Date of the publication, and Page Number.
For articles: Author (full name), Title of article; Name of journal (underlined or in italics), Volume and Issue number, Date/Year of publication, Page Number.
For World Wide Web sources: name of organisation providing the service, the title of the home page and its http://-address (this is the most important reference), the date of creation of that page (if known) or the date of your access (since pages can change or disappear).
Because the WWW is hyperlink media, pages containing ‘hotlinks’ which allow you to go elsewhere, it is important that you note the actual location (URL) of the page from which you have obtained your information. You do that by looking at the Location: field which shows the http://-address. (Some sites allow you to visit other sites within one of their frames without changing the root address. You need to note this.) Here are some examples of acceptable citations:
‘ China’s Accession to the WTO’, by Frederick M. Abbott, January 1998, American Society of International Law, http://www.asil.org/insigh13.htm, Accessed 15 March 1999.
If you take notes using your word processor running simultaneously with your WWW browser, using a process of copy and paste, make sure you put quotation marks around passages which are a direct copy of the Web document to distinguish the copied passages from notes which are in your own words.
Please ensure that you submit all assignments with a signed coversheet to indicate that you have read and understood the plagiarism clause.
For further information on plagiarism please see:
http://www.services.unimelb.edu.au/plagiarism/plagiarism.html
