Fix this Plagiarism

Can your students recognize plagiarism? Do they know how to avoid it?

Here's a sample page from Plagiarism Dropbox to get students thinking about plagiarism and how to avoid it.

First, read the passage below:

Original Source

Fabrics have become an arena for competition for scientists all around the world. The race is on to be the first to develop new fabrics that will not only keep you warm but also cool, dry, moisturised and free of bacteria, odour and stains while measuring your heart rate. Welcome to the world of smart fabrics.

The fundamental job of clothes is to keep us warm or cool, so it's no surprise that many of the smart textiles entering the market look to regulate body temperature.

Source: Hile, J. (2004). Smart Fabrics. http://www.abc.net.au/catapult/indepth/s1435357.htm

Then read this passage that someone wrote based on the original:

Fabrics have become an arena for competition for scientists all around the world. The race is on to be the first to develop new fabrics that will not only keep you warm but also cool, dry, moisturised and free of bacteria, odour and stains while measuring your heart rate. Welcome to the world of smart fabrics.

The fundamental job of clothes is to keep us warm or cool, so it's no surprise that many of the smart textiles entering the market look to regulate body temperature.

The task is to "fix" the plagiarism by taking one or more of these actions:

1. Put " " around copied sections 
2. Paraphrase the existing content 
3. Add new content 
4. Cite quoted sections in text 
5. Cite the paraphrased text 
6. Add Works Cited 
7. Do Nothing (it's not plagiarized)

Feel free to share your solution(s) in the comments section.

For more of a Preview of Plagiarism Dropbox, click here.

We'll reveal the solution in an upcoming post.

Hard-to-find Citation formats

 
A question came to our Help line from one of our Citation Wizard users: 

How do I use APA to cite case law?

Citing legal information isn't one of the pre-formatted options available on our site. It raises a larger question: How do I figure out the proper format for citing unusual information?

When in doubt, each style manual addresses all the possibilities. Libraries have this information in their reference sections.

But for more immediate help, a good online source for citation styles information with examples is maintained by Purdue University's Online Writing Lab, also known as OWL. A Google search for APA citation case law retrieves this page from retrieves this results from OWL: Legal References (APA). It details a large range of legal reference types.

When in doubt, search for help!

Harvard Citation Wizard Updated

The last of our Citation Wizards is now updated to our new look and feel. Harvard Style may be used more outside the US, but a large number of visitors are from overseas (Australia is second only to our US traffic).

Three formats are available:

• Webpage (Website)
• Online Journal
• Online Book

If you would like other Harvard style formats, let us know.

In all, we offer up-to-date bibliographic citation for these styles:

• MLA
• APA
• CSE
• Chicago
• Harvard

Avoid Plagiarism. Cite the information you use.

MLA Citation Wizard

Looking for an easy way to create MLA 8th ed. citations? Give our refreshed Citation Wizard a try.

https://21cif.com/tools/cite/mla/index.html


The Wizard provides these formats:

Website
Webpage
Online Journal
Online Book
Online Video or Audio
Print Journal
Print Book
Print Magazine

If there are other formats you need frequently, let us know!

Citation Challenges

Tracking down missing information for a citation can be frustrating. Even though citation styles like MLA, Chicago and APA make allowances for missing information (e.g., no author, no date), many times all the information is available.
Tracking down elusive information takes some practice, careful scanning and investigative searching techniques.
For this reason, we created the Citation Challenge and Citation Assessment activities.

Citation Challenge offers three challenges of increasing complexity.

• The first level requires players to identify what information satisfies citation requirements. For example, what is the Author's name, the date of publication, the publisher, the Web page, etc.
• Level two is a live Internet search to locate information on an article on a NASA site. The player must locate the name of the author, date, etc. by scanning and browsing.
• Level three is another live search that awards extra points for inputting the missing information in MLA style.
• The whole package is an interactive companion to the Citation MicroModule on the 21cif.com site.

The Citation Assessment offers four levels of difficulty from beginner to advanced. The beginning levels require finding information on a web page with no further searching. The advanced levels require tracking down the original source of the information, using truncation to navigate to directories and metadata to determine last modified dates. Each level has two live searches. Players get a percentage score at the end and can print the results to hand in. We don't recommend using these activities as the basis for a grade. However, they do make good benchmarks for demonstrating skills and progress.