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How to Recognize Plagiarism
What is Plagiarism? Briefly it’s submitting somebody else’s work as your own without
giving them any credit for their work or ideas. Plagiarism is a major no no at the
University. Plagiarism or copying somebody else’s work is also a major infraction in
business. Witness the hordes of trademark, copyright, and patent lawyers presenting
cases everyday.
For example, if you’re starting a small hamburger business you better not use any
variation of McDonald’s double arches M. Believe me, McDonald’s has got their logo
completely legally trademarked!
Let’s take web pages as another example. Let’s assume that someone copies all the
HTML and Java code (these are the languages that format what you see on the world
wide web) that run the web pages for Amazon.com. This code is pretty complex in terms
of web page design. For the user, in this case book purchaser, the web page has what is
termed a very specific “look and feel”. Amazon presumably has done lots of market
research to get its web page looking this way to make it convenient for people to navigate
its web site and purchase items. What happens if our web code copier modifies all of
Amazon’s code and puts in his own business name instead to sell music CDs? The
original Amazon webpage “look and feel” ideas belong to Amazon.com. They can take
this upstart CD seller to court and will probably win.
There are three major types of plagiarism that are occurring today on college campuses:
1) not giving the original author credit for their work, 2) Buying papers off the Internet,
3)submitting a complete term paper or project done by someone else during a previous
semester as your own work.
Not Giving the Original Author Credit
If you use somebody else’s work or ideas as part of your paper or project you must give
them credit . You need to cite the original author and list the work in your endnotes or
works cited list at the end of the paper. This means that you need to give credit for using
an author’s ideas even if you do not directly quote them. For example, let’s assume that
I’m writing a paper on analytical skills needed by people in management today. My
paper elaborates a series of analytical skill sets that a manager needs to develop. One of
the skill sets I identify and discuss is the concept of “data literacy”. You all read Peter
Druckers article "Be Data Literate: know what to know” from the Wall Street Journal
during the second week of class. Your recognize the concept of “data literacy” as
originating with Peter Drucker. I need to say somewhere in my definition something
like: The concept of data literacy has been defined by management specialist Peter
Drucker and then cite this specific document in my list of works cited at the end of my
paper.
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This is how your professors operate. It’s their job to keep current (read) the literature in
their field. They know who is publishing what and what are the new ideas in a field. If
you use one of these publication or ideas without giving appropriate credit, they will
immediately recognize this lack of attribution.
Buying Papers Off the Internet
Yes, we all (both you and your professors) know that complete papers and projects are
for sale on the internet. The quality of what’s for sale tends to vary greatly. I’ve checked
out the website “schoolsucks.com” and personally think that the word after school is a
pretty accurate description of the quality. This is a marketplace and you do get what you
pay for. However, all kidding aside, don’t buy papers off the Internet. After all, why are
you paying to be in school and then pay more to learn nothing. Aside from the violation
of the educational mission and integrity of a class you should also consider the likelihood
that you will be caught plagiarizing in this manner. You found the paper on the Internet.
Your professors are not an information illiterate as you might imagine. Or if they are
they seek out the help of information professionals . . . If a paper looks odd in someway,
i.e. it isn’t your writing style or typical of your analysis skills a red flag goes up. If the
paper is out there on the Internet your professor can find it too.
Submitting Somebody Else’s Paper That They Turned in During a Previous
Semester
The Business School encourages working in groups or teams. After all, many large
businesses operate with product teams. However, don’t equate this concept with being
able to submit a project produced by last year’s team. I know files or repositories of past
years’ papers and projects are kept by various student organizations on campus. Your
other professors are also quite well aware of this fact. Some of them keep lists of topics
of all projects submitted in a semester and some even make copies for their files of all
projects submitted. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that it’s very easy for a
professor to find a past project and compare it to the one your group just submitted. They
better not be the same . . . This is also plagiarism and as some recent cases have
illustrated you will be removed from the class and given a failing grade for this violation.
Ok I think it’s pretty obvious by now that buying papers off the Internet and submitting a
paper from last semester done by somebody else are not good ideas. The other type of
plagiarism, not giving another author credit for their work, is something that’s easy to
avoid by preparing a “Works Cited” or “References” list to acknowledge credit to the
original author. To prepare such a list you need to consult what’s called a “style
manual”. There are a number of these style manuals ranging from the MLA (Modern
Language Association) in English to the CBE for Sciences to the APA (American
Psychological Association) which is used in the social sciences. We’ll be using the APA
style manual for this class because it’s commonly used for business papers and many of
your other social science classes.
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The APA style manual is formally called the Publication Manual of the APA and the
most recent edition (5th, 2001) is kept at the Reference Desk. Just ask the Reference
librarian or reference student for the manual when you need to use it. The complete style
manual is somewhere in the vicinity of 400 pages; it’s not the sort of thing anybody
would want to read straight through. You use the APA to find similar examples of the
material you’re trying to cite. The examples you need for this class can be found on
pages 215 to 281. Why are there lots of examples? Well, lets assume we’re trying to cite
a journal article. The APA has different way of listing the authors if there are: one
author, two authors, three authors, and five or more authors. Yes it’s nitpicky, but
nobody (or at least not many people) have it memorized. When you’re about the compile
your “works cited” list you simply take a look at the APA examples and write out your
list in the appropriate format. The most important thing here is that you give your
reader enough information to be able to find the original book, article, or web
document. I’m not going to be particularly concerned (as in dropping your grade from
an A to a B) if your punctuation is not completely correct, you’ve not used exactly the
right author number format, or if the title is underlined and not italicized. However,
listen carefully to the professor giving you the paper or project assignment. Please be
aware that some professors are looking for the exact APA or MLA style and will lower
your grade for minor stylistic errors.
Using the APA
The first question to ask yourself is what type of material is it that you’re trying to cite: a
book, a journal article, or an Internet document (that’s not part of a Library database) are
the most common types of materials that you will find during your research. We’ve
developed a short version of the APA style manual with some of the most common types
of materials that you will need to cite. The link to print this out is included in your minilectures labeled “Citing Sources with APA Style”. These citation examples are divided
into sections for books, articles, government documents, etc.
Let’s figure out how to cite the following material taken from the Business Abstracts
database that we’ve used during class.
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So, is this a book, journal article, or an Internet document? Clearly this is a journal
article from the journal Advertising Age.
Take a look at your APA Citation Examples linked to in the mini-lectures section. Look
for the category APA: Scholarly Journal Articles and Magazine and Newspaper Articles:
Print Resources.
Look for the following example:
Scholarly Journal Article—Print Resource
[authors]
[article title]
Stahler, G.J. & Cohen, E. (2000). Using ethnographic methodology in substance
abuse treatment outcome research. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment
18(1), 1-8.
[Journal title]
[volume] [number] [pages]
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Note that abbreviations for volume, number, and pages ARE NOT used.
Use above example to write out the citation for the screen captured article that we located
in Business Abstracts.
Flamberg, D. (2000). Win the direct-sales war in battle for holiday 2000.
Advertising Age, 71(38), 40.
Full Text Articles from Library Databases
As we’ve discussed during the course, there is a very important difference between fulltext articles that you find in a Library databases and other articles or documents that you
find on some Internet site. Full-text Library databases are referred to in the APA
Publication Manual as “aggregated databases”. The key thing to remember when citing
articles that you find using Library databases is “Did you read the text online”? If the
answer is yes then there is some additional information that you need to add to your
citation.
Sample Full-Text Article Citation from a Library Database
(See page 231 of the APA Manual to look at this section in more detail)
Eid, M., and Langeheine, R. (1999). The measurement of consistency and occasion
specificity with latent class models: A new model and its application t the measurement
of affect. Psychological Methods, 4, 110-116. Retrieved November 19, 2000, from the
PsycARTICLES database.
(The is where you put IAC SearchBank, Lexis-Nexis, FIS Online, Science Direct)
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Use the above example to write out the citation for the following full-text article that’s in
the Library Database Lexis-Nexis.
Pacini, C., & Sinason, D. (1999). Auditor liability for electronic commerce
transaction assurance: the CPA/CA Webtrust. American Business Law Journal,
36(3), 479. Retrieved March 10, 2002, from the Lexis-Nexis database.
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