Definition of Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined as the unacknowledged use of the words, ideas or creations of another.
Principal categories of unacknowledged use:
- unacknowledged quotations, or failure to credit quotations of another person’s spoken or written words and unattributed borrowing, or failure to credit another person’s ideas, opinions, theories, graphs, diagrams.
- unattributed borrowing also includes the failure to credit another person’s work when paraphrasing from that work.
- cosmetic paraphrasing is also plagiarism. This can occur when an acknowledgement is made but the words are so close to the original that what is deemed to have been paraphrased is, in fact, a modified quote.
A more technical form of plagiarism is wrongly attributed borrowing, where one does not acknowledge the work from which one obtained an idea, but quotes, instead, from the original source, which may well convey a broader research effort than what actually took place.
For more details on the plagiarism policy see University Plagiarism Policy.
