Plaigerism

[unfitmother]

I know I read on the OU website somewhere about a method of checking if you have cut & pasted but does that matter for references? Just realised I've done that for a few.

As long as all cut and pasted bits are properly referenced, in quotes and cited as such then there shouldn't be a problem. Assuming there's not pages and pages of the stuff. I know on our course they weren't too happy about quotes that were more than a few sentences long. In most cases there's no need to quote whole paragraphs, your opinion and take on it is what they are looking for rather than your ability to cut and paste

I thought that the programs for detecting plagerism were designed to spot portions of text that were the same, or very similar as previously published work, rather than the fact that they have been put there by cut and paste. As long as anything copied is aknowledged then that should be fine.

Most universities put assignments through an electronic anti-plagiarism software programme. This comes out with a percentage of copied work anywhere between 0-100. Some universities set the percentage to be flagged up to academics at 15%, others higher or lower. The marker will then go through and see whether the flagged sections are referenced, in which case they are ignored, or if they are things just copied from text books/bought essays etc and presented as if they are your own work in which case they would pass the essay on to the plagiarism department for investigation.

So yes, by all means copy and paste direct quotes and reference them,but don't copy and paste other stuff and pass it off as your own.

i've just submitted my doctoral thesis on plagiarism policies in HE,so will offer my five pence worth... The OU are getting hotter on plagiarism but as far as I know its the main text they focus on not the references. Having said that as an ex OU tutor I always looked first of all at the references and could spot a mile off if they were poorly cut and pasted. This would then make me look more deeply at the main text, and I have in the past flagged up potential plagiarism cases for further investigation. The OU when I last worked there were moving towards plagiarism detection programmes which the majority of HEI's use.
Hope this helps

Unfitmother - I agree with what others have said.

Academic life always relies on being able to quote and build on he work of others. Proper referencing of those quotes and areas of other people's work you are commenting on is perfectly respected. However, what is not accepted is just copying large tracts of someone elses work and presenting it as your own.

Showing that you have read widely and considered many different points of view in a particular field is regarded as an academic strength. Copying someone else's work without acknowledging them is seen as being beyond the pale.

Sadly, plaigerism is very common outside academic life where some professional consulting firms, City analysts and jouralists often take other people's work and and present it without referencing the source. Often this is done out of ignorance and lack of training on 'fair use' and 'proper ethical' standards.

In my academic/profesisonal work, if I needed need to quote a sentence or even paraphrase of what another person has written, I would just put the author's name and year of publication in brackets afterwards and the full reference at the end of the piece of work. If I wanted to quote a whole paragraph I would indent the text and make it a smaller font with the author and year straight after and full reference at the end of the piece of work. It is quite OK to cut and paste a sentence or a paragarph to make sure it is a pefect quote - as long as the reference to the source is there as well.

What I have described above sounds like what you have done so I am sure you will be just fine. There is also usually an 'allowed' amount of cutting and pasting without proper references. I would not worry on this score either, even if you have not referenced properly, as you say it is just a few sentences.

Plagiarism. It's plagiarism!

Sorry

Pedantic ol' me was just about to write the same thing Jux! I've marked State examinations here in Ireland, only once have I dealt with plagiarism in a student's work. He lifted an entire essay from a well known crammer. I was insulted that they thought I wouldn't know it

I mean "he thought I wouldn't know it"

Even the best of us can make typing errors can't we?

It wasn't just you unfitmother, don't take it to heart. MN is known for it's pedants. The ugly heads rise without warning...

Sunny - I don't even understand this bit about cutting and pasting references - how and why would that happen?? What's the difference?

Interesting about an 'allowed' amount of cutting and pasting without citation - there is no such allowance as far as I know - what do you know about that Sunny?

It's not so much that it's allowed cutting and pasting as the fact that programs run usually run on corpus linguistics, which looks at the similarities between relationships between words in the submitted work and in published/known-by-other-methods works. That's why the content is around 15% - not because it's 15% direct quoting but 15% identical/highly similar relationships between words. They would, of course, expect you to quote work appropriately so a target of 0% is not going to be realistic but as much as 25% either means you're over-reliant on other sources or you've pinched it. A lot of systems run by colour coding work e.g. red for direct quote, orange for highly similar, yellow for similar etc.

Ideally things in red and orange should be referenced - either because they're direct quotes or because they're paraphrasing ideas from other sources.

Personally I prefer to footnote rather than use Harvard referencing but that's because one of my undergrad dissertations would have been an absolute BEAST to reference with Harvard owing to the sheer amount of 'Anon, c. 1500' that went on and the fact that I was almost exclusively referencing one edition of a book full of Anons.

The OU does now use plagiarism scanning software if you submit by the eTMA system.

Interesting footnote - you can be caught for plagiarising yourself. The program will 'remember' work you've previously submitted and if you reuse a large chunk it will flag it up!

Oh and there's not method to check the input method yet - so they won't know whethere you've done a Ctl+C,Ctl+V manouvere, selected and right-clicked or type the whole thing out by hand.

frAKKINPannikin

Is it bad if you plagerise yourself?
If I have to do an essay that has similarities to a previous one I have cut and pasted that into the new essay - for example if I had summarised something into my own words, I would just use it again. I had thought that would be OK, as obviously its my words, or is it wrong to do that?

tiger - you can be flagged up for plagiarising yourself. So copying chunks from previous work is frowned. At my university for example, it is treated the same as plagiarising someone else's work. This is because most universities like you to show a full breath of original thought over each of your individual modules in order to award a degree.

I would suggest that you change it around a little bit, rephrase each sentence slightly and you should be fine.

have you submitted the work yet um?

and "its pedants"

Jux: "MN is known for it's pedants."

Oh dear

Jux, you are not alone with the it's thing!! It is only now finally at 34 and doing my MSc that I understand WHY you cannot use an apostrophe in that context. The worst part is, I had to have it spelled out to me like a child by my Canadian professor who wrote all over my essay.

'IT' HAS NO AGENCY!!!

Jux, you are not alone with the it's thing!! It is only now finally at 34 and doing my MSc that I understand WHY you cannot use an apostrophe in that context. The worst part is, I had to have it spelled out to me like a child by my Canadian professor who wrote all over my essay.

'IT' HAS NO AGENCY!!!

tiger - theoretically yes, but that would depend on the individual university's plagiarism policy. You may be let off with a warning but I once advised a student who had used parts of an essay they wrote in their Masters thesis without referencing (basically the 5000 words essay was the basis for the thesis!) so the 'plagiarised content' was much higher than the allowed standard and the mark for that piece of work was adjusted to 0, resulting in no Masters degree. Plagiarism gets more serious the higher up the academic ladder you go. IME first years get a warning and a note in their file plus extra support for referencing. Second years may or may not get that, depending on how serious it is - they're more likely to have an adjusted mark. Third years it's very unlikely the accidental plagiarism argument will hold up unless it's self-referencing. For deliberate plagiarism the penalty purely depends on how much was plagiarised. Universities tend to look on it as there are 2 types of plagiarms: accidental and deliberate. Once you get to graduate level research work all plagiarism is counted as deliberate because it's assumed you will know better

In your situation it depends what you mean by summarised (see discussion on corpus linguistics above!) and how much you changed it around. You wouldn't be expected to reference yourself just for referring to previous research but cutting/pasting would be counted as quoting and should be acknowledged as such.

Birmingham Guild of Students Advice Centre leaflet on plagiarism albeit slightly out of date but useful nonetheless!

The worst thing is that I know the rule perfectly well. I didn't start getting it wrong until I worked for a guy who insisted he was right, but got it wrong ^always& and then I would have to change it on all his work before it went out; in the end I brought my copy of Fowler's in to convince him; very peed off he was.

On MN I suspect I get it wrong because I'm typing fast and dd or dh is talking to me at the same time - excuses excuses