Terms related to Plagiarism
- Plagiarism: to steal, use, or pass off other people’s words and ideas as your own without proper acknowledgment or credit to the original source. To avoid plagiarism, always cite your source!
- Plagiarism (intentional or unintentional): to deliberately and knowingly steal someone else’s work. It is still plagiarism to use someone else’s ideas or information without the intent to steal.
- Attribution: a synonym for the word citation meaning to give credit to an author or the creator of a scholarly work.
- Paraphrase: to restate a portion of text in your own words, using the original ideas of the author. Correct paraphrasing involves completely rewriting the passage in your own words rather than replacing one or two words.
- Quote: to state the exact words of an author in your paper. Within the paper, put the quote between quotation marks, with the author, date, and page number in brackets.
- Source: a first-hand document, statement, interview, video, or primary reference work used in the creation of a research paper. Sources can include books, articles, Web sites, conversations, movies and more.
Terms related to Copyright
- Copyright: a form of protection on original created content given by the United States to the authors of intellectual work.
- Fair use: Copyright states that the owner has the right to “reproduce or authorize others to reproduce” his or her work. Fair use is one of the limitations of copyright, and states that “reproduction of a particular work may be considered ‘fair,’ such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.”
- Public domain: materials available to the public that are not owned by any one person. Works are copyrighted for a set amount of time, and it then enters the public domain.
