UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ, © V. TONAY
You plagiarize when you take ideas from another (source, person) and whether on purpose or not, pass them off as your own. (Had I obtained that definition from another source, I would have just committed plagiarism by not acknowledging that other source.) Plagiarism is a growing problem in universities; its penalties can be severe (see The Navigator for more information on what happens at UCSC if you are caught cheating/plagiarizing). Some attribute the rise in plagiarism to growing apathy on the part of students regarding their own learning, others say the reason is students' pervasive fear that in order to succeed, they must achieve perfect grades, and in order to do so, they must use someone else's "perfect" ideas. Probably, plagiarism is a result of increased pressure to achieve astronomically high GPAs, misunderstandings regarding exactly what constitutes plagiarism, and low self-confidence among students (feeling incapable of meeting assignment expectations). This handout is an effort to illustrate what plagiarism is and isn't.
If you copy phrases, sentences, or paragraphs used in a book, article, on the web, or lecture notes and include them in your paper without referencing them, you are plagiarizing. You will notice when you do this that your writing voice changes. For example, you begin by writing (from your own thoughts), "Freud's theory is confusing, with many ideas describing the way the mind works." Your next sentence is, "Not only are we motivated by forces over which we have little control, and not only are these forces in perpetual conflict, but we do not even know what these forces and conflicts are." The tone of your writing changed from "perfectly respectable student grappling with assignment" to "textbook author with many years' experience." You have plagiarized from pg. 57 of Dan McAdams' (1990) The Person: An Introduction to Personality Psychology text. Although you did not use every single word in Dan McAdams' original sentence, you used many of them. This is not paraphrasing; this is plagiarism.
Paraphrasing is acceptable only when you reference the source. It means that you have taken ideas (often from several sources or places within a single source) and put them into your own words, perhaps even adding ideas or coming to conclusions, reflecting your own thoughts about the material. For example, you might write, "Freud's theory is confusing, with many ideas describing the way the mind works. As McAdams (1990 notes, Freud describes several forces that are unconscious and constantly battling. Some examples would be the superego-id-ego, the unconscious-preconscious-conscious, and the libido."
Please understand, we are many years ahead of all of you in our grasp of psychology. We do not expect you to match what we know! We do know a great deal. We have read a great deal. If you are plagiarizing, it is likely we will catch you. More importantly, you learn nothing that way. We do not expect you to be an expert; we expect you to be a student who is trying to learn difficult concepts by thinking about them on your own.
Between the lines below, you will find an excerpt from The Random House Handbook by Frederick Crews, New York, Random House, 1984, pp. 405-406, which gives some fine examples of plagiarism. (The "1"s should be superscripted, as they are references, but I can't get my html editor to do that.) Notice how, in the last example, the writer's own voice comes through!
Source: The joker in the European pack was Italy. For a time hopes were entertained of her as a force against Germany, but these disappeared under Mussolini. In 1935, Italy made a belated attempt to participate in the scramble for Africa by invading Ethiopia. It was clearly a breach of the covenant of the League of Nations for one of its members to attack another. France and Great Britain, as great powers, Mediterranean powers, and African colonial powers, were bound to take the lead against Italy at the league. But they did so feebly and half-heartedly because they did not want to alienate a possible ally against Germany. The result was the worst possible: the league failed to check aggression, Ethiopia lost her independence, and Italy was alienated after all. 1
1 J. M. Roberts, History of the World (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 845
Version A: Italy, one might say, was the joker in the European deck. When she invaded Ethiopia, it was clearly a breach of the covenant of the League of Nations; yet the efforts of England and France to take the lead against her were feeble and half-hearted. It appears that those great powers had no wish to alienate a possible ally against Hitler's rearmed Germany.
Comment: Clearly plagiarism. Though the facts cited are public knowledge, the stolen phrases aren't. Note that the writer's interweaving of his own words with the source's do not render him innocent of plagiarism.
Version B: Italy was the joke in the European deck. Under Mussolini in 1935, she made a belated attempt to participate in the scramble for Africa by invading Ethiopia. As J. M. Roberts points out, this violated the covenant of the League of Nations. 1 But France and Britain, not wanting to alienate a possible ally against Germany, put up only feeble and half-hearted opposition to the Ethiopian adventure. The outcome, as Roberts observes, was "the worst possible: the league failed to check aggression, Ethiopia lost her independence, and Italy was alienated after all." 2
1 J. M. Roberts, History of the World (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 845
2 Roberts, p. 845
Comment: Still plagiarism. The two correct citations of Roberts serve as a kind of alibi for the appropriating of other, unacknowledged phrases. But the alibi has no force: some of Roberts' words are again being presented as the writer's.
Version C: Much has been written about German rearmament and miliarism in the period 1933-1939. But Germany's dominance in Europe was by no means a foregone conclusion. The fact is that the balance of power might have been tipped against Hitler if one or two things had turned out differently. Take Italy's gravitation toward an alliance with Germany, for example. That alliance seemed so very far from inevitable that Britain and France actually muted their criticism of the Ethiopian invasion in the hope of remaining friends with Italy. They opposed the Italians in the League of Nations, as J. M. Roberts observes, "feebly and half-heartedly because they did not want to alienate a possible ally against Germany." 1 Suppose Italy, France, and Britain had retained a certain common interest. Would Hitler have been able to get away with his remarkable bluffing and bullying in the later thirties?
1 J. M. Roberts, History of the World (New York: Knopf, 1976), p. 845
Comment: No plagiarism. The writer has been influenced by the public facts mentioned by Roberts, but he hasn't tried to pass off Roberts' conclusions as his own. The one clear borrowing is properly acknowledged.