Plagiarism and Academic Honesty

Direct/Verbatim Plagiarism

Direct/verbatim plagiarism involves copying word-for-word someone else's work and putting it directly into your own work without any citations. If you want to use someone else’s words, you must put them in quotation marks and add an in-text citation.

Patchwork plagiarism involves copying direct phrases and ideas from different sources and putting them together into your “new” text. To fit everything together coherently usually requires paraphrasing, which also has to be cited, so it's plagiarism either way. 

Paraphrasing Plagiarism

Paraphrasing plagiarism is usually the most common form of plagiarism. It involves summarizing someone else's ideas in your own words. But just because it's in your own words, it doesn't mean it was your idea. You still need to give credit by citing the original source. 

Global Plagiarism

This type of plagiarism involves taking the entirety of someone else's work and using it as your own. This includes finding a paper online and tacking your name onto it, buying a pre-written paper, or getting someone else to write a paper for you. If you turn in any of these as your own work, that's plagiarism. This one is especially serious because it requires deliberately lying about the true authorship of the document. 

Self-Plagiarism

Yes, you can plagiarize yourself! If you reuse anything you created and turned in for another class, that's plagiarism. Doing this defeats the intended purpose of the assignment and undermines the learning process your instructors want you to perform. Plus, since you've gotten credit for your work already, turning it in again falls under academic dishonesty.

Incorrect/Incomplete Citations

Even though you may have attempted to give proper credit for someone else's work, any incomplete or incorrect citations can still be considered a type of plagiarism. Properly citing your sources is crucial because it not only acknowledges the original creator, but it enables others to find the work you cited. If you have an incomplete/incorrect citation, it could be impossible to figure out what your source was or where you found it -- and that can cause credibility issues for your work, too.