Plagiarism

Plagiarism is when you use another person’s ideas, statements, graphs, pictures etc giving the impression that it is your work and not crediting the true authors.

Plagiarism is defined as passing off someone else's work as your own. This can be research, statements, images and statistical data.

Plagiarism occurs when you don’t acknowledge where the information that you have used in your assignment came from. For example, copying directly from a text, word-for-word, using text downloaded from the Internet, paraphrasing the words of a text very closely, downloading or copying pictures, photographs, or diagrams without acknowledging your sources

In the UK academic community, plagiarism is considered to be a form of Academic Theft.

Staffordshire University has important Academic Misconduct (PDF, file size: 168.68KB)  guidelines with consequences if you break these that can lead to disciplinary action and expulsion from courses.

YES!

Staff are aware of research in their subject area  and  they have supported many students through their studies and can identify changes in writing style etc, that may indicate plagiarism.

The University uses a National plagiarism software solution, Turnitin. This software enables student work to be submitted and checked against a national database for elements of plagiarism

The most important thing you can do to avoid plagiarism is to reference your work.

• Referencing ensures that the sources that you have used in your assignment are credited. This gives the appropriate authors credit for their work.

• Referenced work also enables anyone reading your work to do further research by accessing the same items that you have referenced

• Referencing the sources that you have used for your assignment also highlights the evidence and research that you have undertaken to complete and support your ideas.