Referencing and Academic Integrity

Plagiarism is defined as:   

the unacknowledged use of someone else’s work. This includes material or ideas from any (published or unpublished) sources, whether print, electronic (even if freely available on the internet) or audiovisual. Using the words or ideas of others without citing and referencing them would be construed as plagiarism, and is a very serious academic offence. At the end of the day, it is regarded as the stealing of intellectual property (Pears and Shields, 2019, p. 4).

When you plagiarise, you pass off someone else’s work, whether intentionally or unintentionally, as your own for your own benefit. You quote, paraphrase, summarise or copy material without acknowledging the original sources. When you plagiarise, you are not following correct referencing guidelines. You are guilty of academic dishonesty.

Plagiarism is a form of academic misconduct and is taken very seriously by ECA-HE and may be seen as Academic Misconduct that can incur penalties including loss of marks, a fail grade for an assessment or a unit, or expulsion from the College.

To avoid plagiarism, provide appropriate credit to your sources by adding author–date in-text citations for direct quotations and ideas (e.g., credit the originators of theories). If you model a study after one conducted by someone else, give credit to the author of the original study. 

Some examples of plagiarism (Handley and Cox, 2007) include:

• Copying chunks of text without using quotation marks and without appropriate acknowledgement, for example, cutting-and-pasting from websites or online research papers, or copying papers by other students.
• Copying text and making very minor changes and without appropriate acknowledgement. This is an example of unacceptable paraphrasing.
• Copying lyrics (audio plagiarism) or photos, images and designs (visual plagiarism) without crediting the original sources.
• Duplicating your own work, for example, ‘recycling’ a piece of your own work that you have previously submitted for another module or course (self-plagiarism).
• Citing and referencing sources that you did not use.