Recognizing and Avoiding Bad Practice

Edel Sherratt

What is Plagiarism?

• Aberystwyth University statement on Plagiarism

• http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/student/ug-issues/exam-assess/handbook/section-13/

JISC/PlagiarismAdvice.org

• http://www.plagiarismconference.co.uk/documents/FAQ.pdf

Wikipedia

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

Cornell University

• http://plagiarism.arts.cornell.edu/tutorial/exercises.cfm

• There are many more excellent tutorials and quizzes provided by the US universities

Cardiff University

• https://ilrb.cf.ac.uk/index.html

University of East Anglia

• http://www.uea.ac.uk/menu/admin/dos/quiz/

Cambridge

• http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/students/plagiarism.html

Aberystwyth University

• http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/is/infoskills/plagiarism/

Bodging It

• Some students cut and paste text from the web• Then they modify the text until it passes a

plagiarism checker …• like Plagium: http://www.plagium.com• or http://sourceforge.net/projects/antiplagiarismc/

• or http://www.turnitoutsafely.com/• or http://www.grammarly.com/• Is this a problem?

What about this?

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/aaps/

Or this?

• http://www.paraphrasingmatters.com/

Better ways to avoid plagiarism

• Always keep track of what you’ve read; develop annotated bibliographies

• Always give credit where credit is due; this includes images and ideas as well as text!

• Make sure you understand what you are paraphrasing.

• When you make a claim or state a fact, see if you can find any authoritative evidence to back it up.

Citation and reference

• Different styles – footnotes, end of chapter, end of book or paper

• Two common styles in science are Harvard and IEEE

Harvard citation style

• In the text (the citation)– '… (Jones, 2010)' or– '… as described by Jones (2010)'

• In the bibliography– Jones, I.W., (2010) 'New kinds of red ink', Inky

Journal of Pigments, Poppleton University Press, vol 336, no. 5, pp 55-58

Example from Edel Sherratt, ‘Writing an MSc Dissertation’ PGM0120, SEM1020, CHM1320, 2010, 2011

IEEE citation style

• In the text (the citation)– '… [7]' or – '… as described by Jones [7]‘

• In the bibliography– [7] Jones, I.W., 'New kinds of red ink', Inky Journal

of Pigments, Poppleton University Press, vol 336, no. 5, pp 55-58, March 2010

Example from Edel Sherratt, ‘Writing an MSc Dissertation’, SEM1020, CHM1320, PGM0120, 2010 and 2011

Ask for help

• When in doubt, ask the person who set the work

• Or your research supervisor• Or a tutor• Or a member of the library