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Capstone Research and TRIO McNair Undergraduate Research Guide: Avoiding Plagiarism

To support students conducting research including but not limited to Capstone Projects and TRIO McNair Undergraduate Research

Definition

Chapter 14 of the UW System Administrative Code defines plagiarism as a form of academic misconduct, which can result in a range of disciplinary actions ranging from receiving a lowered grade or failing a course to removal from a program, suspension, or expulsion. Academic misconduct is a serious issue, and it is vital to understand what exactly plagiarism is and how to avoid it. 

Forms of plagiarism include, but are not limited to: 

  • Copying whole papers or passages from another student or from any source. 

  • Allowing another student to copy or submit one's work. 

  • Buying or obtaining a paper from any source, including term-paper sellers and internet sources, and submitting that paper or passages of it as one's own work. 

  • Pasting a passage from the internet or any computer source into one's paper without quoting and attributing the passage. 

  • Fabricating or falsifying a bibliography. 

Strategies for Avoiding Plagiarism

Credit must be given when using one of the following in the own research paper: 

  • another person's idea, opinion, or theory 

  • any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings, or other non-textual elements used or that you adapted from another source 

  • any pieces of information that are not common knowledge 

  • quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words 

  • paraphrase of another person's spoken or written words