How to credit source material
By Steve Niles
Using resource material is always a great way to add value to your writing. However, you have to be careful always to give credit where credit is due. ZATZ has very high editorial standards, especially when it comes to that dirty word, “plagiarism.”
Everybody knows stealing other people’s work is wrong. What can get authors in trouble, though, is the fact that plagiarism can often occur by accident. I decided to consult some of the experts to find out what exactly constitutes plagiarism.
In the notes of his 1996 lecture entitled, “Plagiary and the Art of Skillful Citation,” John Rodgers, Ph.D., of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas writes, “To some it might appear that plagiarism is easy to spot, but it is easy to find situations where ‘reasonable people will disagree.’ For example, copying an entire sentence without citation would be considered by most to be plagiary. What about three or four words in a row? Some sentences are short!”
Rodgers brings to light a major fallacy in many people’s thinking about plagiarism. They believe that plagiarism only occurs when entire sentences or long strings of words are lifted from another work. However, as we shall see, plagiarism has been committed as soon as you take not just the words, but also the ideas of another. What follows is an excerpt from the University of Northern British Columbia’s regulations on plagiarism according to the 1996-97 Calendar.
Plagiarism: This refers to the presentation or submission of the work of another without citation or credits, as your own work. Whenever the thoughts, words, drawings, designs, statistical data, computer programs, or other creative work of others are used by either direct quotation or by paraphrasing, the author and the source must be clearly identified through the use of proper referencing (ie., footnotes, endnotes).
The regulations go on to state, “When no recognition is ascribed to an author for phrases, sentences, thoughts or arguments within a student's work, substantial plagiarism exists.” Therefore, the simple solution to avoiding plagiarism is to make certain that any words or ideas you borrow from another source are properly cited. This can be done in several ways, but when writing for ZATZ, the preferred method would simply be to cite the source within the context of your article, as I did in the above paragraphs.
Avoiding plagiarism really isn’t hard, as long as you’re careful. To sum up, here are a few basic rules to follow:
- When an exact quote is used, the sentence or sentences must be placed within quotation marks. For longer quotes, (generally four lines or more), an entirely indented paragraph can be used. In our journals, we begin such paragraphs with the string “.QUOTE” and let our journal production system do the indenting.
- If you are paraphrasing someone else’s words, it's still necessary to include some form of citation. If you were to copy and paste text from another source and then change a few words or rearrange sentences, it's still considered plagiarism. You must credit the original author and source. For example, you could cite a direct quote like so: “Tommy Thompson of Unsubstantiated Weekly writes, ‘We shall have a robot president in the next one hundred years.’” Alternatively, you could paraphrase: “Sometime in the next 100 years, we’re going to have a robot for president, according to Tommy Thompson at Unsubstantiated Weekly.”
- If you borrow just an idea someone used in another document, the idea itself must be credited. For example, “In 1997, Jerome Johnson of the Wichita Science Consortium postulated the existence of sub-atomic gnomes living inside computer chips.”
- Citation is not necessary when writing your personal views, describing things of your own invention, or discussing ideas that are of general knowledge. For example, you would never have to write, “The squirrel fell out of the tree because of gravity, which was first described by Sir Isaac Newton in 1665.”
The important thing is that it’s always clear to the reader which ideas are yours and which belong to an outside source. If you ever have a question about what should be cited or how something should be cited, feel free to ask your ZATZ editor.
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