Cite Your Sources: Plagiarism

“Plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty that is considered a serious offense and carries severe penalties ranging from failing an assignment to suspension from school. You are guilty of plagiarism any time you attempt to obtain academic credit by presenting someone else’s ideas or words as your own without appropriately documenting the original source.” Source: Hudson Valley Community College’s Plagiarism Policy.

Copying another person's words or ideas without proper acknowledgement is cheating. It is regarded as a serious academic offense that can result in serious disciplinary action.

Direct Plagiarism
Is a word-for-word transcription of a portion of someone else’s work, without proper attribution and without quotation marks.

Self Plagiarism
Occurs when a student submits his or her own previous work from another course assignment, or mixes parts of previous works, without permission from all professors involved.

Accidental Plagiarism
Occurs when a person neglects to cite their sources, or misquotes their sources, or unintentionally paraphrases a source by using similar words, groups of words, and/or sentence structure without attribution.

Before you start

Students, please first confirm with your professor that using ChatGPT or other content produced by generative artificial intelligence (AI) is acceptable before citing it. Your professor may also have a specific way they would like you to reference ChatGPT.

Why should I reference ChatGPT content?

References tell your reader where your information came from and how you used it in your work. If you use content created by a tool like ChatGPT, including it in your works cited - as you would with any other source - is the responsible thing to do. If you use ChatGPT to help write or structure your paper, even if you do not otherwise quote or paraphrase its content, you will likely wish to acknowledge your use of it in some manner. This provides transparency to your reader.

Here are some ideas for citing ChatGPT responsibly:

• Save a transcript of your chat. Make it available to or retrievable by your reader, possibly by including it as an appendix to your work or as an online supplement.
• Describe the prompt that generated the specific ChatGPT response.
• Include the date when the response was generated or date of access. This is important as these tools will update regularly.
• Acknowledge how you used the tool. You can do this even if you only use ChatGPT to plan your paper or generate ideas and don't include any of its generated content.

The following was submitted by Associate Professor & Librarian Valerie Lang Waldin with permission of copyright owner, Professor & Writing Specialist Jim LaBate. 

In 1976, after 12 years of research and writing, Alex Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The book claimed to trace the true story of Haley’s family back to its African origin, sold well over a million copies, and became an extremely popular television mini-series. Unfortunately, another writer claimed that Haley had stolen entire passages and sued him for plagiarism. When confronted with the evidence, Haley recognized his errors and settled out of court for $650,000 (“Slavery Book”). The lesson for writers everywhere is that plagiarism should never be taken lightly.          

Writers are guilty of plagiarism any time they take another’s words or ideas and present them as their own (“Plagiarism” 858). Many college students plagiarize because they are not aware that they need to give credit to their sources, because they are not as meticulous as they should be in their research, or because they are unwilling to do the necessary work and hope they will not get caught. 

In any event, students at Hudson Valley Community College should know that plagiarism is listed as “prohibited conduct” in both the Hudson Valley Community College Student Handbook (143) and the college Catalog (329). They should know, too, that if they are found guilty of plagiarism, they could face certain consequences such as receiving a failing grade in the paper itself, a failing grade for the course, and possibly suspension or dismissal from the college.     

To avoid plagiarism, students should use their sources in one of three ways: with quotation marks, with a paraphrase, or with a summary.

1. Quotation Marks. Most students know they can use a quote from a source, but many go too far and quote too much. As a general rule, quotations should be used sparingly. According to Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers, authors of The Bedford Handbook, quotations should be used “When language is especially vivid or expressive, when exact wording is needed for technical accuracy, [and] when it is important to let the debaters of an issue explain their positions in their own words” (570). ​
2. Paraphrase. When writers paraphrase, they take their source’s information and put it in their own words, using approximately the same length. So, if they paraphrase three sentences from a source, the paraphrase should also be three sentences. The mistake many college writers make is they simply change one or two key words. That is not a paraphrase; that is plagiarism. To paraphrase properly, one should try to do so from memory without looking at the original source, and, then, the writer should check that his or her words and phrases do not resemble the source too closely (Hacker and Sommers 567-68).
3. Summary. A summary highlights the key points or arguments in a much shorter format. A two-hour movie, for example, might be summarized in one paragraph, or a 300-page novel might be summarized in 500 words. Summaries are especially useful when writers have to give the reader some background information before moving on to an in-depth analysis (Hacker and Sommers 534).

Taking good notes and keeping track of your sources will help you avoid plagiarism. A few ways to avoid plagiarism are:

Summarizing - Briefly state the information in different words.

Paraphrasing - Translate all content into different words.

Quoting directly - Use only when the author's wording makes a specific point.

• Start early and work consistently throughout the term. “Term” papers, after all, are meant to be completed over the course of the semester and not in the one or two weeks before the paper’s deadline.

• Keep thorough records of all your sources. When possible, make a copy of the original source, or, if you’re searching through a computer database, print a copy of the document even if you’re not sure you’ll use it in your paper.

• Take good notes and clearly differentiate among direct quotes, paraphrases and summaries, and common knowledge and personal opinion. Otherwise, you may leave out quotation marks when they’re called for, or you may neglect to cite a paraphrase or a summary. Some students use different colored highlighters to make the distinctions even more obvious.

• Prepare your parenthetical references and your list of sources as you write your paper. On your first term paper, you may find that documenting the in-text citations and compiling the final list of sources are the most difficult aspects of the whole paper. You can avoid this frustration and stress if you learn to document correctly as you write the paper, and you’re less likely to plagiarize if you’re conscientious about documentation throughout the entire research process.

• Proofread everything thoroughly. Be meticulous about proofreading the text of your paper. If you misspell a few words or have some grammatical errors, you will probably lose only a few points. However, if you neglect to include necessary quotation marks, or if you fail to cite your sources properly, you could be found guilty of plagiarism and fail the assignment completely.

• Consult your Handbook. Everything you’ll need to know about writing a research paper and avoiding plagiarism is included in the Handbook you’ll use for your Composition courses.

• Get help. You can always ask your teachers for help or go to the Learning Assistance Center on the lower level of the Library or to the Writing Classroom in the Campus Center.

Source: Hudson Valley Community College’s Plagiarism Policy.