General Information | Research as a Process | Information Literacy in the Classroom | Ethics of Information | Assessment

Ethics of Information

Plagiarism | Copyright | Citation | Bibliography | Resources

Plagiarism

An outline of a PowerPoint presentation on Preventing Plagiarism will provide instructors with advice on how to detect and prevent plagiarism. Within the tutorial, some brief information is provided about programs that help instructors detect plagiarism. More information about this topic can be located on the Programs to Help Combat Plagiarism page. Some strategies for what to do when plagiarism is suspected are presented by Rebecca Moore Howard.

For students, TILT Module 2: Avoiding Plagiarism outlines various types of plagiarism and help students:

Copyright

When can you use something that is copyright protected? When your use of the work is considered to be "fair use". For educators this means the use of excerpts of copyrighted works for certain educational purposes and under specific conditions.

Fair use is determined by considering four factors:

1) Purpose – how the work is being used. Use for educational purposes will be looked upon more favorably than use for commercial purposes.

Nonprofit educational use
Face-to-face teaching
Criticism and comment
Scholarship and research
News reporting

2) Nature of the copyrighted work –

Fiction: which is the result of a person's creative effort, will be more carefully protected than non-fiction, which might itself be based on other works.
Published or unpublished
Published before or after 1976

3) Amount -

Quantitative: how much of the work you are using in proportion to the whole.
Qualitative: not the "heart of the work"

4) Effect –

No significant effect on the market for the copyrighted work
No significant effect on the potential market for the copyrighted work
No similar product marketed


All four of these factors need to be considered by you when you use someone else's work. The wise thing to do is to ask permission.

You can learn more about fair use at the University of Texas's copyright tutorial pages or at IUPUI's Copyright Management Center.


Copyright on the Internet

Copyright issues also have to be considered when you use something from the Internet or other electronic service. .

The lack of a copyright symbol or other statement of ownership does not mean that copyright is not applicable. Copyright is automatic if two stipulations apply: 1.) the work is an original work of authorship and, 2.) the work is fixed in a tangible form.

It is best to assume that all materials are copyrighted the moment they are put into a tangible form. Since March of 1989, no copyright notice is required in order to claim copyright. You should exercise caution when downloading material from the Internet to produce your own multimedia projects, because works protected by copyright and works on the public domain are all mixed together on the Internet.

Fair use still applies with the Internet, but it is always a good idea to ask for permission.

 

Citation

Problems with suspected plagiarism often arise because students are unaware of what needs to be cited and how to properly cite. Some guidelines could be handed out to students to remind them of the information they should gather about their sources when doing online research. Lewis & Clark's writing center has developed Web resources to help students address this issue and others.

Bibliography

Buranen, L., & Roy, M. A. (1999). Perspectives on plagiarism and intellectual property in a postmodern world. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Gruber, S. (1998). Coming to terms with contradictions: Online materials, plagiarism, and the writing center. Writing Center Journal, 19(1), 49-72.

Howard, R. M. (1995). Plagiarisms, authorships, and the academic death penalty. College English, 57(7), 788-806.

Howard, R.M (2000) The ethics of plagiarism. In M.A. Pemberton (Ed.), The Ethics of Writing Instruction (pp. 79-90). Norwood NJ: Ablex.

Pennycook, A. (1996). Borrowing others' words: Text, ownership, memory, and plagiarism. TESOL Quarterly, 30(2), 201-230.

Roig, M. (1997). Can undergraduate students determine whether text has been plagiarized? Psychological Record, 47(1), 113-122.

Walker, J. R. (1998). Copyrights and conversations: Intellectual property in the classroom. Computers and Composition, 15(2), 243-251.

 

Resources

Plagiarism and Anti-plagiarism
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/plagiarism598.html

Plagiarism
An overview with practical advice from Hamilton College.

Plagiarism: What It Is and How to Avoid It.
From Indiana University.

The Puzzling Paraphrase
Tips from the University of Minnesota.

Franklin Pierce Law Center: Copyright on the Internet
http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/copynet.htm

Copyown: A Resource on Copyright Ownership for the Higher Education Community
http://www.inform.umd.edu/CompRes/NEThics/copyown/

Public Domain Materials

Copyright's Commons: Links to the Public Domain
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/Public_Domain_Links.html

Citation Resources

Electronic Reference Formats Recommended by the American Psychological Association
http://www.apastyle.org/elecref.html

MLA
http://www.mla.org/

Access instructions:
1. Choose MLA Style from Main Menu
2. From menu on left, choose "Frequently Asked Questions About MLA Style"
3. From the FAQ, choose "How do I document sources from the World Wide Web in my works-cited list? "
Instructions and examples are listed on that page

Chicago Manual of Style
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq.html#7

 

This page maintained by Reference Desk refdesk@lclark.edu. Lewis & Clark College. Watzek Library 0615 SW Palatine Hill Rd. Portland, OR 97219. (503)-768-7274. Updated 10 March, 2003.