APA Formatting and Using Scholarly Literature for Nursing and Allied Health

Avoiding Plagiarism

Questions to consider:

• What kinds of activities are considered plagiarism or academically dishonest?
• Can I get in trouble if I accidentally plagiarize?
• When (and where) do I need to cite sources of information in my writings and assignments?

View the following video: Avoiding Plagiarism (YouTube, 2:20)

Avoiding plagiarism and properly crediting your sources is an essential skill for success in both college and the workplace. Knowing when and how to give credit when using someone's ideas is the very first step in being a good writer, but also in being a responsible citizen and continuous learner.

Whether done on purpose or accidentally, plagiarism and academic dishonesty can come with serious academic consequences (Empire University policy). These are all examples of plagiarism or academic dishonesty:

• Submit work that someone else wrote or created, in whole or in part.
• Submit work that does not fully attribute your sources of information (in other words: copying or paraphrasing others' ideas and not citing them).
• Submit the same work for two different courses or assignments (without the explicit permission of your instructor).
• Write or create work and allow someone else to submit it as their own.
• Fail to cite ideas or facts in your academic writing that aren't your own. Every sentence (or single block quote) that contains info from an outside source, even if citing from the same source several sentences in a row, needs to include an in-text citation. The only exception are facts or ideas that are commonly known.
• Fabricate or change data for a research assignment.

Best practices for avoiding plagiarism:

• Give yourself plenty of time to complete your assignments. Especially the first few times, doing research can be more time consuming than you think. Try using the Assignment Calculator to help you plan this out.
• Ask your instructor if you have any questions about an assignment. You can also contact Academic Support for tutoring and writing help options, and the librarians (right side of library homepage) for questions about using the library or citing sources.
• Take notes and track all your possible sources of information while searching for and reading sources.
• Cite every instance of an idea or information that isn't your own in the text of your papers. Every in-text citation should point to a full citation at the end of your paper. Proofread your citations in addition to your writing.

In academic writing in APA style, there are several required citation elements:

1. The idea you took from the original source, in the form of a direct quote or a paraphrase/summary.
2. A brief, in-text citation, containing author last name and date of publication (and, if available, page number where the information is from within the source).
3. The full citation at the end of your paper. This is where you put the more detailed elements, depending on the type of source, such as URL or DOI, journal title, and more).