# Transcript

### Stephen Serjeant, Senior Lecturer in Science

In general if you’re writing an essay or a scientific report you are claiming to be the originator of that information, either by your own experiments or your own calculations, or your cross comparisons of other results. This is always true unless you say otherwise. And you could do that, for example, by citing the place where you got that information. The only other exception is if you’re saying something that is so well known that it’s obvious to every reader that you’re not the originator of this result, and this is what I think is meant by common knowledge. So, for example, ‘that the Universe is expandi ng’ – if you say that in a piece of academic writing, people aren’t going to assume that you are the discoverer of that because that’s well known, that’s someone else. I think this is very similar across disciplines. Science is not particularly unusual here.

The key test whether something is or isn’t common knowledge is whether a reader might think from reading your report that you have generated this information from your own experiments or your own calculations. Remember, this is the default assumption for anything you’re writing. For example, if you take a diagram from the web and stick it in your essay or report, and you don’t say where you got it from it’s going to look very like you made it yourself – okay? And, so, not saying where you got it, is regarded as a sort of fraud, scientific fraud, and this is taken very seriously. Also taking a direct quote from someone else and not putting it in inverted commas is a way of passing those words off as your own words and that’s a similar sort of fraud. It’s all plagiarism.

But if you want to quote a number of key points from some well researched or well understood area, it’s okay to cite a textbook or review article for all of these results provided that it’s clear from your phrasing that your citation refers to all of these points. Alternatively, you could hunt down the original references such as Edwin Hubble’s original discovery of the expansion of the Universe, but only do that if you’ve read them because you may be surprised at the content.

Academic judgement is an assessment of your readership. Are your readers likely to believe that because you say, for example, ‘humans evolved from other primates’, that you’re claiming to be the one who’s found that out? Well, maybe not in that case, but if there’s any danger that they might make that assumption about anything else that you’ve got from elsewhere then cite your source. Is it better when in doubt to reference? Absolutely. Yes.