Let's get the idea of plagiarism behind us right at the beginning. Deliberate copying of other people's work to pass off as one's own is stealing intellectual property. Sometimes, however, people are just confused about what they can and can't use and how they might handle various situations. Purdue University Online Writing Lab has a great handout to help students Avoid Plagiarism.
Take a look at a web file that focuses on Strategies for Dealing with Plagiarism. Scroll to the end of the file and click on the link for how to cite this page. This is your first example of how citing other people's work has a format and follows a unique configuration depending on the style book in use and the type of source being cited. Now, let's move on to the idea of citing in more detail.
The online Merriam Webster Dictionary recognizes Citing something as the " act of quoting by way of example, authority, or proof a passage from a book, or from another person, in his own words; also, the passage or words quoted; quotation." It defines a bibliography as " the works or a list of the works referred to in a text or consulted by the author in its production." These words will be further clarified by your instructor in the context in which you are expected to apply them but for now these general definitions provide a common place of understanding.
A major concern for everyone in this age of information is the idea of intellectual property rights. Using other peoples' ideas, taking words written or spoken by someone else and calling them your own, and a good amount of other things that happen on stage, screen, radio and the World Wide Web are serious considerations. When your looking for information and more importantly when you're using what you found, remember to recognize those who contributed to your thinking and idea formulation.
Quoting, Paraphrasing, Summarizing and Plagiarizing are related activities. It helps to understand what these words mean and the subtle differences among them so that you can more easily determine for yourself what requires a formal or informal citation and why.
Think of it like finding a school of fish. You're going to want to identify and record how to return to find that spot again. You'd use your chart and, if you have one, a GPS, global positioning system, to isolate and note your location in relation to distance from shore, proximity to stationary buoys, and the depth of water in which you were fishing. If you want to return to the spot or let someone else in on your " sure thing " the coordinates will lead back to the same spot and with a little luck more fish than you can carry home again and again.
Acknowledging source material is an important skill for people who make presentations in front of audiences. A good place to get started is to make sure that you understand the rules of citing information and that you concern yourself with the details of following formats published by one of several authoritative bodies that concern themselves with the rules of publication. Two of the most prominent guidelines are published by the Modern Language Association, "How do I document sources from the World Wide Web in my works-cited list?" http://www.mla.org/(MLA) and the American Psychological Association http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html(APA). Consult the website of either organization.
A fast way to get started and log some practice time by using an online tool called Noodlebib at http://www.noodletools.com/noodlebib/index.php. Noodlebib is a Web application that allows you to create and edit an MLA bibliography online. The site includes examples of the guidelines for using online materials and can help you to practice puting a citation and even a bibliography together.
And don't forget to tap what you already know. If you want to give writing a citation a try on your own, get a magazine article in front of you and ask yourself a few questions.
- Who wrote the article?
- What is the title of the article?
- What is the name of the magazine the article was in?
- What is the publication date on the magazine?
- What pages was the article on?
Keep your answers in order because, along with punctuation, the order is what provides the format.
The format is the formal organization of the details that describe the article. A typical magazine citation leads with the author's name, which is followed by the title of the article, the name of the magazine it was published in comes next, followed by the date the magazine was published and the page (s) it was on. Punctuation matters! Periods and quotation marks make a difference later on when citations get more complicated so pay attention to what goes where.
Here's a couple of sentences from the National Fisherman Online, edited by Jerry Fraser, " Being a highliner is as much about who you are as what you do; Look at it this way: On a given day, most anyone can stumble onto a set of fish; with a highliner, it's expected. "
The basic format for a magazine article is... Author. "Title of Article." Title of Periodical Date: First page-last page.
The citation then is... Fraser, Jerry. " The Highliners. " National Fisherman Online: December 2001 pg. 1.
But the trick to writing good citations is in following the guidelines. The above example is an informal approach that gets the job done but, as in most things worth doing, there's more to it than that. The correct citation if following MLA guidelines would be...
"The Highliner." National Fisherman Online Dec. 2001: 1. 21
Jan. 2002
The difference is in the details. Jerry Fraser is the editor of the magazine and no author was given a byline on the article. The publication the magazine article came from was an electronic version online and not a tradition paper copy. The rule is to include the access date as well as the publication date and the URL (the web address) I used to retrieve the article.
Learning how to acknowledge when you are using someone's words and/or ideas isn't particularly difficult but it does require a sincere effort to pay attention to detail. A formal citation is created by your commitment to follow an agreed upon guideline designed to ensure that words or ideas that belong to someone else can easily be traced back to the source they were taken from.
In other words, if you take a sentence or paragraph from a book or magazine article and include them in an essay or website, then you have to let your reader know where the material came from and provide the information in a way that is easy to follow so they can locate the original work for themselves.
If we couldn't access and use other people's discoveries, performances, writings and inventions much of what is done in scholarly, scientific and artistic arenas would never happen. But to use or build on the accomplishments and productions of others without acknowledgement or credit is a form of thievery. There are copyright laws and organizations committed to clarifying and resolving issues related to the challenges brought about by dealing in an area where things are as clearly defined and easily controlled as some would like.
Copyright is a serious thing and it is your responsibility to know the law including changes brought about by the " Digital Millennium Act. " Don't take any chances. Use what you know is yours or what you know is in " the public domain " or ask someone who can advise you in a responsible way. Concepts like Fair Use, the idea of Public Domain , concerns related to copyright when using the WWW, underline the warning that copyright is a complicated issue and it's never a good idea to guess.