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Study Skills Workshop

Elena Pierazzo

Richard Gardner

5 October 2012

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Programme for the day

• 10-11: How to cite, how to avoid plagiarism (EP)• 11-12: Harvard Referencing System (RG)•  • 12-13:30: lunch break•  • 13:30-14:30: Managing bibliography and citation

online: Introduction to Zotero and use of the King’s College London Zotero style sheet (RG)

• 14:30-16: How to write an essay, how to write a project report

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Citing

• Why it is so important• Scientific Method • Academic writing

Scholarly Method: history

• aka The Enlightenment University• First Free Universities in C18 Germanyo "free as in speech"o independent from Church and

goverment• Established need for rational argumentoNo ex cathedra pronouncementsoReproducible evidence and methodoCitation of previous scholarship

Asynchronous Collaboration

• Scholar A does researcho 20 years later, writes book, includes citationso book published

• 30 years later, Scholar B reads booko follows citationso reproduces experimental methodologyo disagrees with resultso new researcho 20 years later, writes new booko includes Scholar A among citations

• This is collaborationo even if they never meet

Scholarly Method: recap

• Experimental Physicso cite earlier theory and experimentso credit all collaboratorso document experimental method reproducibly

• Theoretical Literary Criticismo cite earlier critics (to show insane)o credit all proponents of your theoryo document argumentation painstakinglyo footnote everything

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Purpose of reading relevant literature

• Identify work already done (and in progress)

• Prevents duplication • Avoid pitfalls and errors of earlier research

– Popper: all success built on failure

• Help design methodology• Find gaps in existing research • Find your own “original” point of view

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What’s wrong with this?

“The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) developed a system to control culture in order to erase ethnic background and produces citizens with a common identifications, including a common language.”

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What’s wrong with this?

“According to historians, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) developed a system to control culture in order to erase ethnic background and produces citizens with a common identifications, including a common language.”

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“According to White 2009 and earlier research reported by him, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) developed a system to control culture in order to erase ethnic background and produces citizens with a common identifications, including a common language (pp. 43-44).”

PLAGIARISM

• A serious offence• An insidious problem

Source for this section: Department of War Studies, King’s College London

PLAGIARISM

‘The taking and using as one’s own of the thoughts, writing or inventions of another’ (Oxford English Dictionary)

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King’s Regulations

Plagiarism is the taking of another person’s thoughts, words, results, judgements, ideas, images etc., and presenting them as your own. All work submitted as part of the requirements for any examination or assessment of the College must be expressed in the student’s own words and incorporate their own ideas and judgments. Direct quotations from the published or unpublished work of others, including that of other students, must always be identified as such by being placed inside quotation marks with a full reference to the source provided in the proper form.

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Paraphrasing – using other words to express another person’s ideas or judgments – must also be acknowledged and referenced in the appropriate manner. In the same way, the authors of images and audiovisual presentations must be acknowledged.

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Examples of plagiarism include but are not limited to:

• Copying ~ a student should not copy someone else’s work or thoughts and pass this off as their own, even if s/he has their permission;

• Copying ~ a student should not insert the writing or thoughts of others into their written work without the correct referencing;

• Copy and paste ~ a student may not copy text verbatim and pass this off as their own, without using quotation marks and citing the original source;

• Paraphrasing ~ avoid closely paraphrasing someone else’s work (e.g. by changing the order of the words slightly); either quote the work directly using quotation marks or put the ideas completely in your own words. Remember either way you must acknowledge the source using the appropriate citation conventions

• Self-plagiarism ~ when students submit the same piece of work (or a significant part thereof) for different assessments – students can only be given credit once for any given piece of work;

• Essay banks ~ when students submit an assessment that has been written by a third party or obtained from a professional writing ‘service’.

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Levels of Plagiarism

• Minor plagiarism: plagiarism is less than 20% than the total assignment

• Major plagiarism: second offence of a minor plagiarism; plagiarism is more than 20% of the total assignment

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Plagiarism risks

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it

were; that is into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’

contents.

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men

can therefore fight to their hearts’ contents.

YOUR ESSAYModern weapons are steadily pushing war under the carpet into environments where those weapons do not work.

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is into environments where those weapons

do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’ contents.

YOUR ESSAYModern weapons are steadily pushing war under the carpet into environments where those weapons do not work. (Van Creveld, 1991:32)

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is

into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’ contents.

YOUR ESSAYVan Creveld sees Modern weapons as steadily pushing war under the carpet into environments where the weapons do not work. (Van Creveld, 1991:32)

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is

into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’ contents.

YOUR ESSAYBecause today’s weapons systems are so large, powerful, blundering and costly, war is becoming focused on places like cities where

the weapons are ineffective.

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is

into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’ contents.

YOUR ESSAYVan Creveld sees modern weapons as so costly and blundering that they are ‘steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet’. (Van Creveld, 1991:32)

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is

into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’ contents.

YOUR ESSAYVan Creveld sees modern weapons technology as self-defeating. In his words:

So expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet…into

environments where those weapons do not work. (Van

Creveld, 1991:32)

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is

into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’ contents.

YOUR ESSAYVan Creveld sees modern weapons technology as self-defeating, because it encourages combatants to focus their efforts in places like cities where large weapons are ineffective. (1991:32)

AVOIDING PLAGIARISM

• Use multiple sources• Be careful in note taking

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it

were; that is into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’

contents.

YOUR NOTESModern weapons steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet into environments where they don’t work.

YOUR NOTESModern weapons steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet into environments where they don’t work.

YOUR ESSAYModern weapons are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet into environments where the weapons do not work.

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it were; that is

into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’ contents.

YOUR NOTESModern weapons steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet into environments where they don’t work.

YOUR ESSAYModern weapons are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet into environments where the weapons do not work.

SOURCE BOOKSo expensive, fast, indiscriminate, big, unmaneuverable and

powerful have modern weapons become that they are steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet, as it

were; that is into environments where those weapons do not work, and where men can therefore fight to their hearts’

contents.

YOUR NOTESModern weapons are so costly and blundering that they are ‘steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet...into environments where those weapons do not work’. (p.32)

YOUR ESSAYVan Creveld sees modern weapons as so costly and blundering that they are ‘steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet’. (1991:32)

YOUR NOTESModern weapons are so costly and blundering that they are ‘steadily pushing contemporary war under the carpet…into environments where those weapons do not work’. (p.32)

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TurnitinUK

• Built in within KEATS• Applied automatically to all your

submissions• Check against plagiarism on a gigantic

database of articles, books and all essays and dissertations ever submitted via TurnitinUK

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File formats

• Microsoft Word™ (DOC and DOCX)• Corel WordPerfect®• HTML• Adobe PostScript®• Plain text (TXT)• Rich Text Format (RTF)• Portable Document Format (PDF)• OpenOffice (ODT)

The file size may not exceed 20 MB.

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Originality Report

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Other Ethical issues

• If anything you do involves people, you need approval from ethics committee

• E.g.: interviews, surveys, user testing, focus groups

• http://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/ethics/applicants/sshl/lowrisk.html

• Give evidence of your interviews: “The curator of the museum told me…” IS NOT evidence unless you put the transcription of the interview in appendix