Welcome to the Cerro Coso Community College Library’s tutorial on avoiding plagiarism .
The first question we have to answer is: What is plagiarism?
According to Cerro Coso Community College, the definition of plagiarism is “the act of using the ideas or
work of another person or persons as if they were one’s own, without giving credit to the source.
Such an act is not plagiarism if it is ascertained that the ideas were arrived at through independent reasoning or logic or where the
thought or idea is common knowledge.”
To summarize, plagiarism is a form of copying.
If you copy someone else’s homework and pass it off as your own, you are plagiarizing their work.
If you copy and paste a paragraph, an image, or a graph into your paper, that is also plagiarism – unless, of course, you give credit to the original
creators by citing your sources.
There are some instances where you do not need to give someone credit – namely,
when the ideas are your own or when they are common knowledge.
We will look at some examples of these later on.
There are many types of plagiarism. The most commonly known form is the type where someone submits all or a significant portion of
someone else’s work as their own.
This includes having someone else write your paper for you or using a paragraph or image without credit.
Some forms of plagiarism are less common. These may include taking someone else’s work and changing a few key words, or paraphrasing
the content to make it sound original. It
is also considered plagiarism if uncited sources are lumped together with cited sources, or if inaccurate or non-existent citations are created
for uncited sources.
Note that even if you include citations for your sources, your paper might be an example of plagiarism if you don’t include any original
content, so don’t forget to analyze the information you get from your sources!
So why should we avoid plagiarism?
In academia, many people make their living off their ideas and research.
It is important to give credit to the original authors in order to recognize their contributions to the field and
ensure that they can keep doing what they are doing.
By citing outside sources, you also strengthen the credibility of your paper.
Not only will quoting other sources help prove that you are not making things up, but your essay will be more impressive if you can demonstrate
that experts in your field are backing up your arguments.
A paper that includes many voices and a long list of citations at the end is much more persuasive than a paper that expects its readers to take its
word as fact without proof.
Citing your sources also allows your readers to look up your sources and determine for themselves whether the information is credible
and whether you might be misrepresenting the original author’s intentions.
Finally, it is important to avoid plagiarism because there are often severe consequences for getting caught,
both in school and beyond. In school, you are likely to be punished academically with a failing grade or even expulsion.
In the working world, however, consequences can be worse.
You may lose your job, get involved in costly lawsuits, and have to pay thousands of dollars.
Even if there are no monetary consequences, it is very likely that you will lose your reputation in your industry.
At Cerro Coso Community College, consequences for plagiarism are usually up to the instructors
who discover the incident.
They may choose to give the student a failing grade for the assignment, or they may fail the student for the course.
If the incident is severe enough, the student may be sent to the Vice President of Student Services, or may be suspended from the college.
The student who plagiarizes is not the only one at risk for these consequences. If a student allows another to copy a paper or exam,
then both are equally guilty of plagiarism.
To avoid plagiarism, you must always cite your sources whenever possible.
The type of sources you should always cite include information that you quote directly,
as well as content that you paraphrase from another source.
Paraphrasing means that you change the wording or summarize that source, but you still retain its meaning and information.
Finally, you should always cite the source of images, charts, tables or graphs that you use, even they are widely found all over the internet.
There are a few things that do not need to be cited and are not considered plagiarism.
These include your own ideas and conclusions as well as data you collect yourself.
For example, if you write a paper on a discovery you have made using data you found independently of others,
it is not considered plagiarism even if you later learn that someone else has made the same discovery.
However, if you know about their discovery beforehand and try to take credit for their work, that is plagiarism.
Although you need to cite the ideas that someone else has, you do not need to cite your own analysis of those ideas.
Finally, you do not need to cite common knowledge which is known by many people and can be found in numerous sources.
For example, many people know that Mars is closer to the sun than Jupiter, so there is no need to cite this information even if you have not
personally travelled the solar system to prove it.
On the other hand, if you are listing the exact percentage of the various elements that comprise Mars’ atmosphere without having
measured them yourself, you should give credit to your source or risk being accused of plagiarism.
While some people use the terms plagiarism and copyright infringement interchangeably, they are two different things.
Plagiarism is using someone else’s work without giving credit where it is due and citing the location of the original source.
Copyright infringement is using or making a copy of someone else’s work without their permission.
In general, you can avoid plagiarism by citing your source when you copy or use it.
However, this does not mean you have avoided copyright infringement, unless you also have permission to copy it or if you can prove that it
falls under public domain or fair use exemptions.
Public Domain works are generally those whose intellectual property rights have expired.
These dates vary depending on the location and type of work.
In the United States, copyright generally expires 70 years after the author, or, if owned by a
corporation, either 95 years after publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first.
There are other specifications regarding the status of more recent works and those whose copyright has been renewed, but
most books published before 1923 now fall under public domain.
Please note that although a work might be considered public domain, a specific performance or iteration of that work may still be
within copyright.
For instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is in the public domain, but if someone else takes a photograph of the Mona Lisa and posts it online,
they own the copyright of that image and the image is not in the public domain.
An up and coming alternative to copyright laws is something called Creative Commons,
which gives authors greater freedom and flexibility in granting permissions to use, alter,
and distribute their works.
You can find out more about this at creativecommons.org
Ultimately, you should cite all works you use which are not yours, regardless of whether or not they are in the public domain.
If they are not in the public domain, however, you also need to determine whether you are actually allowed to use them without permission.
In many cases, you are allowed to use quotes and images in your academic papers based upon a section of copyright called Fair Use.
Fair Use determines the extent to which you can use or distribute copyrighted works without permission.
Some examples of fair use include criticism, commentary, parodies, or educational purposes.
This last one is what gives the majority of instructors and students the ability to use copyrighted materials in a classroom setting.
There are four main factors that determine Fair Use: Purpose, nature, amount, and effect on the market.
All four of these factors are taken into consideration in determining whether a situation is fair use.
The first factor, the Purpose of the use, generally considers something fair use if it being used for educational, nonprofit, preservation or
transformative purposes.
While the majority of academic usage is justified by this factor, using something for educational purposes is only considered fair use if it
conforms with the other three categories as well.
The nature of the original work is the second factor taken into consideration.
Fair use tends to apply to published nonfiction and educational works, and less to unpublished works or creative works of art, fiction, and film.
It almost never applies to consumable products like workbooks.
The third factor is the amount of the original work used.
The less you use of a work, the more likely it is to fall under fair use.
One rule of thumb suggests photocopying no more than 1 chapter, 1 article, or 10% of a book to be used in the classroom.
In the case of poetry or short stories, it may be easy to reproduce the whole thing in an essay, but this is unlikely to fall under fair use.
The final factor is the effect on the market of the original work.
Your use of the work should not deprive the copyright holder of income, which means that copying large portions of a work so that someone
else does not have to buy a copy would not fall under fair use.
If you are unsure as to whether or not using portions of a work will fall under fair use, you may wish to err on the side of caution.
When in doubt as to whether something falls in the public domain or fair use, or whether something might be considered plagiarism,
ask your professor.
If necessary, find out who holds the copyright and contact the owner for permission to use their work.
After all, wouldn’t you want credit if someone used something you made?