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Resources for Writing: plagiarism

The official policy of Holy Cross is to expel students who are caught twice violating the rules of academic honesty.  Such violations include cheating, plagiarism and collusion.  (Collusion is the attempt to help another student commit some form of academic dishonesty.)  Plagiarism can be particularly problematic, because students do not always know that they are commiting it, yet they are held to account for it.  College policy holds that it is the responsibility of the student to avoid plagiarism and to become familiar with proper forms for quoting, summarizing and paraphrasing the work of others.

The Holy Cross course catalogue defines plagiarism as the "act of taking the words, ideas, data, illustrative material, or statements of someone else, without full and proper acknowledgment, and presenting them as one's own." (Holy Cross 2000-2001 Catalogue, p.14)  If you are not sure whether you are using sources fairly, or whether you are citing them correctly, there are a number of useful websites that may be of help:

• The Purdue University Online Writing Lab and the University of Indiana offer advice on how to recognize and avoid plagiarism. These will help you to form some idea of how closely you can summarize or paraphrase a source before you step over the line.  They also include brief discussions of the concept of common knowledge, the one sort of information that you can obtain from a source without having to provide documentation.

Proper Documentation of Sources

The key to avoiding charges of plagiarism is to document the sources of ideas that are not your own, or of information that does not constitute common knowledge.  Proper documentation  provides all of the "facts of publication" necessary for your reader to track down and examine your source.  These include, but are not limited to, author, title, date.  Proper documentation also employs, in a consistent manner, a widely recognized documentation format.  (Examples are offered below.)

In order to document your sources properly, you must take careful research notes.  Whenever you take notes on the published work of others, you should record all of the facts of publication at the beginning of your notes.   As you read, jot down the page number(s) of any information you record, so that you do not waste valuable time later on trying to track down that information to include in a footnote.   Find a way of indicating to yourself whether you are recording a direct quotation or merely paraphrasing the author(s).

Within the text of your paper, documentation will take the form of footnotes, endnotes, or parenthetical notes.

• Footnotes and endnotes are similar in that both are flagged in the body of your paper with sequentially ordered, superscript arabic numerals.   The content of a footnote appears at the bottom (foot) of the text page on which the corresponding superscript number appears.  The content of an endnote appears in a list at the end of the paper, just before the bibliography.  Both types of note provide abbreviated source citations, commonly consisting of author, date and page number(s).  More complete publication information--including author, date, title, place of publication and sometimes publisher--is then provided in a bibliography at the end of the paper.
• Parenthetical notes are placed within the body of the text itself.  They, too, commonly cite author, date and relevant page number(s).  More complete publication information, including author, date, title, place of publication and sometimes publisher is then provided in a reference list at the end of the paper.

There are certain types of information, known as the facts of publication, that must appear in any bibliography or reference list, but there are a number of acceptable ways of organizing this information.  Three options are offered by the Purdue University Writing Lab:

• The official guidelines of the Modern Languages Association, which are used by many humanist scholars.
• The official guidelines of the American Psychological Association, which are used by many scientists.
• A set of unofficial guidelines for formatting sociology papers.

Because classical archaeology is an interdisciplinary field, you may employ any of these formats, or any other officially recognized bibliographic format, such as that outlined by the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th edition, available in the Reading Room at Dinand.  Whatever format you choose, be sure to employ it consistently. Do not jump back and forth between different styles of citation. You might want to select a format that corresponds to the requirements used in your major field, so that you can familiarize yourself with it for future use.  Try picking up a book or article in your field and imitating its documentation format for notes and bibliography.