3 Plagiarism and basic referencing techniques

When students find information relevant to their work, they may not appreciate the necessity of acknowledging their sources. By providing references, readers can assess the foundations upon which the work is built. This enables them to judge the arguments, determine which thoughts are original, and explore the topic in greater depth. Most crucially, it acts as a deterrent against plagiarism and the theft of ideas.

Whether intentional or not, a failure to cite your sources can be considered a form of intellectual dishonesty. This can have serious real-life consequences. For example, the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), the organisation which represents the eight largest examining bodies in the UK, considers plagiarism a form of malpractice. In the most serious cases, the awarding body reserves the right to bar students from entering exams for a set period of time. Similarly, students applying to University will find that their personal statements are scanned by plagiarism detection software. Once at university, students found guilty of plagiarism can even be expelled from their courses.

It’s therefore prudent to familiarise students with the concepts of plagiarism and referencing whilst at school. Although plagiarism – the act of passing other’s work off as one’s own – is a concept which can be easily be explained, the methods of citation will require more in-depth instruction.

There are several main ways to reference information. The most popular method used in UK universities is the Harvard style (Caulfield, 2022), but other common examples include the Modern Language Association (MLA) style, the American Psychological Association (APA) style, and the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) style. Whichever method is used, students should recognise that the source of their information, be it an idea, image or direct quotation, must be cited, even if it's been paraphrased. To do otherwise is plagiarism. Although younger students don't need to be taught how to cite and reference, it's still wise to stress the principle of not passing others' work off as your own. To this end, it may be helpful to encourage teachers of as many subjects as possible to include references in their handouts and presentations. In turn, teachers could get their students to list the books and websites they’ve used at the end of their own work. You may also wish to go a step further and collaborate with staff on an academic integrity policy which can be used to promote referencing throughout the school.

For older students, it may be instructive to look at examples of real academic citation, consult university plagiarism guides, assess their peers’ work, or complete activities where they have to identify which elements of a text should be referenced.

To think further about this topic, watch the video below where Sarah discusses the importance of acknowledging sources and sets out strategies for educating students about plagiarism.

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Transcript: Video 3

SARAH:

I think it's important when we're talking about information handling that we are aware of the aspects of academic integrity. It's never too early to start showing students how important it is to develop best practice in avoiding plagiarism.

There've been some researchers who've done a global study, which has actually shown that when people start acting on plagiarised articles that have appeared because of their exams or because of things that have been duplicated in the international press, that actually has a direct effect on the economic prosperity of that country.

So we've got to be very careful that we are a society, a human society that builds ourselves on the shoulders of giants. If those giants are a bit wobbly, then we've got to watch out about the decisions that we're going to take. And it's because of this and because of the consequences of it, that exam boards are very hot on people who plagiarise and you could even be banned from taking exams in the future if you are found to have copied without reference to where the source of the information was.

Exam boards now actually have detection software that not only looks at exam scripts, but it also looks at the personal statements that the students might write for going to university. So it's got real life consequences. We need to show what best practice is. And as librarians, we can help write the school policy and promote the idea amongst teachers that they should be showing and expecting students to do referencing on any work that they find, and also to be aware of the laws surrounding paraphrasing and self-plagiarism. And of course now, we're faced with not just text, but also pictures, and music, and other media.

Well, how do we do this? Well, the good news is actually there are a lot of fairly good games out there that people can play and that's a lighter way of introducing what can be quite a dry subject. University websites, if you look at those, have got plenty of advice on how to go about teaching these aspects of information handling. And also, we shouldn't be too afraid to get the students to mark their own work. So if we say to them, look, these are the practices you should avoid. Get them to swap work with each other and have a look at that, then that's really worthwhile.

Little thing we can do very easy little exercise here is that you give students a postcard and you give them a timer of 1 minute to write as many words about their wonderful holiday they had on that postcard, and then you get them to write their name on the top and you swap it with the person next to you. That person scrubs out the original writer's name and writes their own name instead, then you get them to count up the number of words and the one with the most words gets the reward. This exemplifies plagiarism very, very realistically.

End transcript: Video 3

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