keele university code of practice on postgraduate research degrees

8 Plagiarism in student writing is <strong>of</strong>ten unintentional, as when a school pupil, assigned
to do a report on a certain topic, goes home and copies down, word for word,
everything on the subject in an encyclopaedia. Unfortunately, some students
continue to use such 'research methods' without realising that these <strong>practice</strong>s
constitute plagiarism. Students may certainly use other persons' words and thoughts
in their essays or research papers, but they must acknowledge the authors.
9 The most blatant form <strong>of</strong> plagiarism is to repeat as your own someone else's
sentences, more or less verbatim. Suppose, for example, that you want to use the
material in the following passage, which appears on page 906 in volume 1 <strong>of</strong> the
Literary History <strong>of</strong> the United States:
"The major concerns <strong>of</strong> Dickinson's poetry early and late, her 'flood subjects',
may be defined as the seasons and nature, death and a problematic afterlife,
the kinds and phases <strong>of</strong> love, and poetry as the divine art."
If you write the following without any documentation, you have committed plagiarism:
The chief subjects <strong>of</strong> Emily Dickinson's poetry include nature and the
seasons, death and the afterlife, the various types and stages <strong>of</strong> love, and
poetry itself as a divine art.
You may present the information if you credit the authors:
Gibson and Williams suggest that the chief subjects <strong>of</strong> Emily Dickinson's
poetry include nature, death, love and poetry as a divine art (1974, 1, 906)
The sentence and the parenthetical documentation at the end indicate the source,
since the authors' names and the volume and page numbers refer the reader to the
corresponding entry in the bibliography:
Gibson, W.M. and Williams, S.T. 1974. 'Experiment in Poetry: Emily Dickinson
and Sidney Lanier in Literary History <strong>of</strong> the United States, ed. by Robert E.
Spiller and others, 4th edn, 2 vols, New York: Macmillan, 1, 899-916
10 Other forms <strong>of</strong> plagiarism include repeating someone else's particularly apt phrase
without appropriate acknowledgment, paraphrasing another person's argument as
your own, and presenting another's line <strong>of</strong> thinking in the development <strong>of</strong> an idea as
though it were your own. Two more examples follow:
Original source
This, <strong>of</strong> course, raises the central question <strong>of</strong> this paper: What should we be
doing? Research and training in the whole field <strong>of</strong> restructuring the world as
an 'ecotopia' (eco, from oikos, household; - topia from topos, place, with
implication <strong>of</strong> 'eutopia' - 'good place') will presumably be the goal. (From E.N.
Anderson, Jnr., 'The Life and Culture <strong>of</strong> Ecotopia' in Reinventing
Anthropology, ed. by Dell Hymes, New York: Vintage-Random, 1974, 275.)
Plagiarised in student writing
At this point in time humankind should be attempting to create what we might
call an 'ecotopia'.
COP on PGR Degrees, November 2011 81