Guides: Academic Integrity/Plagiarism: Plagiarism

About Plagiarism

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the act of fraudulently representing someone else's intellectual property as your own. In the SUNY Maritime College Student Handbook, plagiarism is defined as the following:

"Plagiarism is the act of presenting another person's ideas, research or writing as your own."

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to "Plagiarize" means to:

steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
use (another's production) without crediting the source
commit literary theft
present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

What Happens if You Plagiarize?

In you plagiarize during your time attending SUNY Maritime College, you are:

failing to uphold the SUNY Maritime College Oath
missing the opportunity to learn and to apply the necessary skills needed to be successful in your future career/profession.
doing something unethical
withholding your own opportunity to exercise your research and writing skills and abilities
subject to failure of the assignment or examination, failure of the course, dismissal from the Regiment of Cadets, or dismissal from the college.

Although plagiarism can be easily defined, sometimes it is difficult to know what exactly constitutes an act of plagiarism. The following actions are considered acts of plagiarism:

Directly copying and pasting someone else's work. This form of plagiarism can range from copying and pasting a single sentence to purchasing an entire paper and representing the material are your own work.
Inadequately paraphrasing source materials. It is considered plagiarism when taking an excerpt from someone else's writing and only changing a few words in the sentence or paragraph. When paraphrasing, it is of the utmost importance to restate the ideas of the passage completely to that of your own voice. Even if the language you are using is similar to the original passage, it is considered plagiarism if you do not cite your source.
Sampling small pieces of someone else's work and adding it to your paper without citing the source is considered plagiarism.
When paraphrasing a work significantly, you are still expected to cite where you found the original idea. Although the words are your own, the initial idea belongs to the author of the original source of information that you are utilizing.
You must always provide a citation for a quotation, even if you have put quotation marks around it. You must supply the reader with the source the quote came from.
Insufficiently citing a source, or when you correctly cite your source once but do not continue to cite it throughout your assignment, is considered plagiarism.
Using a video, image, or music without citing the source of the media is considered plagiarism.
Believe it or not, it is possible to plagiarize your own work! When using a paper you have already writing for one class for a different class and assignment, you care committing self-plagiarism. Even if you modify a previous paper or assignment, you must get permission from your professor and correctly cite your previous paper.

Remember, you are responsible for making clear distinctions between your ideas and the ideas of the scholars who have informed your work.

Do not procrastinate. Waiting to start or complete your assignment until the last minute will leave you feeling stressed and rushed. Often, when students under stress, citation errors are made, or students will feel the need make the poor decision to copy and paste parts of their assignment, just to turn it in on time. Please leave yourself plenty of time to not only write your paper, but to properly cite your sources! Good time management will save you from stressful sleepless nights.
Practice the proper usage of your required/often used citation style. The more you use a citation style (MLA, APA, Chicago) the more comfortable and adept you will become at properly documenting your sources and formatting your assignments.
Keep track of your source materials. The easiest way to keep track of your source materials is to keep an actually copy of the source. Print out, copy the source, or save the electronic copy. It is much easier to work with paper material, than try to remember where you found a source.
Take good notes. Take complete notes, and include author's names and page numbers for easy reference later. Within your source material, highlight key passages and annotate the text in the margins. Just please do not write in library books!
Keep an updated work cited page during your research. Keep a list of all sources that you think you will use when writing you assignment, in the required citation style. This will alleviate stress later on when you are creating your work cited page, and also help you keep your source materials organized. Make sure that in this working bibliography you note the important citation information for your source material (ex. title, author, publication information, URL, etc.) Use the citation tools available in databases, word processing software, and online.
Ask your librarian or professor. If you are unsure about how to cite source material or whether or not something should be cited, check with your instructor or librarian; they are the professionals.

For further information please look at the following site:

Purdue University Online Writing Lab "Using Research"

About Plagiarism:

Avoiding Plagiarism: