BIOL 4600: Senior Seminar

Avoiding Plagiarism

UNC Charlotte students should understand and abide by the University’s policy on academic integrity. See the link at the bottom of the box.

What is Plagiarism?

• "In an instructional setting, plagiarism occurs when a writer deliberately uses someone else’s language, ideas, or other original (not common-knowledge) material without acknowledging its source."
• "This definition applies to texts published in print or on-line, to manuscripts, and to the work of other student writers."
• "A student who attempts (even if clumsily) to identify and credit his or her source, but who misuses a specific citation format or incorrectly uses quotation marks or other forms of identifying material taken from other sources, has not plagiarized. Instead, such a student should be considered to have failed to cite and document sources appropriately."

From the Council of Writing Program Administrators’: See the link below for Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices.

The compilation of resources for research papers or projects necessarily includes not only books, but also articles from periodicals (i.e., journals and/or magazines)—vital sources of up-to-date information and scholarship. When issuing assignments, instructors often specify whether articles consulted are to be from popular or scholarly publications (the former usually referred to as magazines, the latter as journals). Although popular sources are not without merit and may also contain well-considered writing, the purpose of distinguishing between these types of works is to determine their degree of authority and depth of research on a given topic, and thereby their intrinsic academic value. The following chart points out the distinctions between popular and scholarly periodicals.