Copyrights and Proper Use of Sources

This site is designed to help you understand the complex copyright laws and the proper way to use the ideas and words of others in your own work legally. Most of the incidents of plagiarism at our school are not intentional, rarely does a student actually download a full research paper, but not understanding what plagiarism is causes several students to get F's on their early papers. I hope this list of sources and descriptions will help us start out on the right foot this year and help you avoid a lot of the problems and frustration that lead you to being discouraged and not doing well. There are several links to assist you, just click the URL's below.

If you don't "know what plagiarism is" you can't avoid it. There are many types of plagiarism (click on the gif. above).

This site from UCLA defines plagiarism and helps you avoid many of the "traps" that new writers fall into:

http://www.westga.edu/~mmcfar/preventing_plagiarism.htm


Here are a few more sites that will further explain what is acceptable and what is not in your work.

http://factmonster.info/spot/plagiarism.html

http://libguides.tru.ca/content.php?pid=83248

http://kidshealth.org/kid/feeling/school/plagiarism.html#

Paraphrasing is a legitimate way for you to borrow material from a source. This page will help you understand how. It contains some good, solid examples of how and how not to paraphrase:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/619/01/
(There are also several links to other writing techniques and skills on this page)


This page from OWHL gives you a great outline for setting up a "Works Cited" page and has excellent examples of actual citations in most formats (ex: APA, MLA etc.):

http://wiki.noblenet.org/owhl/panwiki/index.php/Citing_Sources

Son of Citation machine and easybib are "citation engines" which means they will create a citation for you if you insert the information necessary. This saves a lot of guesswork for you:

http://citationmachine.net/

http://www.easybib.com/