AVOIDING PLAGIARISM
Write Better Papers in APA, Chicago, and Harvard Citation StylesBy Ken K. WongiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Ken K. Wong
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-7628-3 Contents
About the Author.............................................................viiForeword.....................................................................xvPreface......................................................................xviiAcknowledgement..............................................................xixChapter 1 – Introduction...............................................1Chapter 2 – Strategies for Avoiding Plagiarism.........................3Chapter 3 – What are In-text Citations?................................12Chapter 4 – What are References?.......................................15Chapter 5 – Online Citation Generator and Software.....................19Chapter 6 – APA Style..................................................28Chapter 7 – Chicago Style..............................................46Chapter 8 – Harvard Style..............................................66Epilogue.....................................................................85Bibliography.................................................................87
Chapter One
Introduction
What This Book is All About
"When in Rome, do as the Romans do." (St. Ambrose, 387 A.D.)
Academic writing is different from your day-to-day business report or blog writing. There are certain rules that you must follow or else your professor will deduct marks from your work. Furthermore, academic journals require authors to follow a particular writing style for their manuscript submissions. Unfortunately, most university students are not being taught this subject during their undergraduate studies. As a result, I am dedicating this book to help you master the art of academic writing.
First, know that there are different kinds of citing and referencing styles. In the field of business, the common ones are APA, Chicago and Harvard citation styles. I will cover each of them with examples later in this book. How about MLA, Oxford (documentary-note), and Vancouver (URM)? I am not going to talk about the MLA and Oxford styles because they are only common in Humanities courses such as history, philosophy, language and arts. I am also not going to spend time on the Vancouver style because it is mostly used in the biomedical field. If you absolutely want to learn about these citation styles, please visit the following web sites:
- MLA: Modern Language Association (www.mla.org)
- Oxford: http://www.deakin.edu.au/current-students/study-support/ study-skills/handouts/oxford-docnote.php
- Vancouver: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (www.icmje.org)
In the next chapter, I will discuss the issue of plagiarism and give you some tips to avoid the problem. Then, the concepts of in-text citations and referencing will be introduced to you in great detail. In chapter 5, I will show you some online citation tool and software that you can use for academic writing. Finally, selected citation and referencing examples using APA, Chicago and Harvard styles are presented.
Chapter Two
Strategies for Avoiding Plagiarism
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism refers to the use of others' ideas and presenting them as your own. It is intellectual theft and is considered a serious academic offence. The most common type of plagiarism is a direct "Copy and Paste" action. For instance, copying the content from a book and making a book of a similar title, is definitely an act of plagiarism. But how about copying just a sentence or two? Well, if you cite my sentences properly using a quotation format, there should be no problem.
The smart students will put up their hands and ask, "Dr. Wong, what if I paraphrase your sentence?" In my opinion, this is still reverse engineering because you are taking another's thoughts as your own. Remember, your professor is interested in seeing your critical thinking skills so instead of paraphrasing others' points, why don't you critique their thoughts and add in your own analysis? The brave students would even ask me questions like "Dr. Wong, how many words can I copy directly without being caught by those anti-plagiarism software?" My answer: 5 words.
While some students intentionally plagiarize others' work to cheat, I believe that there are many students out there who commit plagiarism and related academic offences unintentionally; that is, they commit plagiarism simply because they do not know how to write properly. Common mistakes include:
1. Incorrect in-text citations and references: the publication year is wrong and the author's name is misspelled.
2. Incomplete in-text citations and references: this often happens in a long paragraph where multiple thoughts from different authors are mentioned.
3. Lack of reference: student forgets to provide the corresponding reference after including the in-text citation.
4. Assemblage: student spends too much time in making reference to others' thoughts (although with proper citing/referencing) and makes little original contribution.
5. Self-plagiarism: students recycle their own papers that were previously submitted in other classes.
What you need to remember is that professors have tools to spot out plagiarism not only in paper assignments, but also in discussion board contributions. Your work will be compared to millions of web pages and homework database among most universities in just a matter of seconds, so do not risk committing plagiarism!
The Problem of Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V
The plagiarism issue is a difficult topic to discuss with students. This is because some students, especially those who come from certain countries where their educational system is not that well developed, have never been taught about this issue in school. In some cases, students have heard about it but because they have never seen any actual enforcement of the school policy (e.g. student dismissal), they believe that "Plagiarism is not a problem until I get caught!". Students go ahead and plagiarize without realizing the seriousness of such academic offence.
In 2010, I posted a blog entry at the education section of the Asian Correspondent web site to discuss the issue of plagiarism. Many students have found my article useful so let me share it with you:
Plagiarism is a serious academic offence. The problem is getting bigger and bigger as students can now "extract" information to re-use in their assignments in a matter of seconds. The smart ones know that you're using tools like Turnitin to catch them so they turn to Synonymizer software to do better reverse engineering. To get the students understand the issue of practicing Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V better, I recently acted as a story teller and my MBA students seem to get the message pretty good. Feel free to spread the story if you find it useful: John and Mary enrolled into a cooking class in a prestigious culinary school. After learning all of those fancy cooking techniques for three months, it's time to show off their cooking skills during a tasting event which is also their final examination. They were given the whole afternoon to prepare for their meals at home and bring back their `creation' to school during dinner time. The judges were eager to taste their delicious dishes. Some unexpected situations happened at noon. The power went out in the dorm where both John and Mary were staying. So, the electric cooker, stove and fridge were not working. John, being very nervous, went out to several upscale restaurants nearby to order some takeouts. Mary, who's also getting very nervous, went out to shop at a nearby supermarket. At the evening tasting event, John happily put his five-course meal on the table for the judges to taste. Mary, on the other hand, took out a loaf of bread and spent 10 minutes to make her "Club Sandwich" using some pre-packaged deli, tomato, lettuce and mayonnaise in front of the judges. The result? John got a failing grade while Mary got a 82 percent. Do you know why? P.S.: If your students are using Macs, replace "Control-C and Control-V" with "Command-C and Command-V". By Dr Ken Wong
The original blog entry and response to my article can be found at: http://asiancorrespondent.com/U21Global/the-problem-of-ctrl-c-&-ctrl-v
Using the Turnitin Online Checking Tool
Without doubt, Turnitin.com is one of the most popular online plagiarism checking tools that is used by universities and colleges around the world. While Turnitin is often used by professors, many schools have actually purchased campus-wide license to allow students to check papers on their own. Please ask your professor to learn if you can utilize this online tool during your study.
The process of checking papers via Turnitin is very simple. Once you've logged in with your username and password, all you need to do is to select your course ID and upload your paper for checking. If your professor has not set up a specific course ID, you can also use the "Quick Submit" function to do a one-time checking of your paper.
Since Turnitin has to check your work against its complex database, it usually takes 3 to 5 minutes to check a paper. The result is presented graphically with a "Similarity Index":
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The example here shows all papers that have been examined by the Turnitin system in my class. As you can see from this diagram, most papers have green and yellow color. When the Similarity Index has reached over 50%, the indicator color changes to orange and the most problematic one will be shown in red. For each checking, a detailed examination report is also generated to show you how your paper is being compared to others.
Free Online Plagiarism Checking Tool
If you do not have access to Turnitin, there is a free tool that you can use over the web. The Plagiarism Checker is an online tool created by Biran Klug of the University of Maryland back in 2002. It is still one of the popular free online tools for checking plagiarism.
You can either paste sentences there for checking, or upload a single MSWord file for checking as well. After pressing the "Check the paper" button, the result is shown almost immediately.
This web tool is accessible at: http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/
Tackling Discussion Board and Assignment Question
Nobody (myself included) is born an academic writer. It takes time to learn the proper way to research and write about a topic. When I come across cases of plagiarism, I talk to the students and try to understand why the plagiarism occurred. I have found that many students, especially the younger ones in their early 20s, have been so used to taking shortcuts in compiling their papers or discussion board postings.
Here is what they usually do. Let us assume that the topic of interest is about the "Hybrid Car".
Step 1: Google "Hybrid Car" from the web.
Step 2: Copy and paste a large chunk of text into MSWord.
Step 3: Go to Wikipedia and search "Hybrid Car".
Step 4: Copy and paste a large chunk of text into MSWord.
Step 5: Search "Hybrid Car" from those free-essay sites
Step 6: Copy and paste a large chunk of text into MSWord.
Step 7: Move the paragraphs around.
Step 8: Do a "find and replace" in MSWord to change the text to make it fit with the question (e.g. from Green Car to Hybrid Car)
Step 9: Write the introduction and conclusion parts, hoping that the professor will not read through the whole document.
Do you do the same in doing research? If yes, now is the time to change your style and start learning the proper way of writing research papers. I have asked some of my students to use the following procedures, and I have seen substantial improvement in their outputs. Perhaps you can also give it a try!
Step 1: Before doing any googling, spend at least 5 minutes to think why the professor is asking for this topic. Yes, it is about Hybrid Cars but why is it important to know about this kind of cars right now? Is it about pollution? Is it about energy savings? Or is it about international business? What is the key theme of the paper that you are going to write?
Step 2: Let us say that the theme is about pollution, do a research on this topic on the Internet.
Step 3: During your research, see how the launch of the hybrid car is related to pollution. Who are the players in the sectors (e.g. Honda, Toyota, GM..etc)? How are they performing? Who are the customers? What makes consumers choose a Hybrid Car over a traditional gasoline-based vehicle?
Step 4: Write down your findings on a piece of paper in bullet points.
Step 5: Write down the web site address for the relevant pages that you have visited. You will need them for your reference list.
Step 6: Using the bullet points that you have just written on a piece of paper, start writing your paper from scratch in your word processor.
Step 7: Prior to submission, double check whether you have the proper introduction, problem statement, situational overview, analysis and conclusion.
Step 8: Check the visual presentation: Have you made good use of tables and charts to present some of your ideas? How about fixing the fonts and spacing?
Step 9: Spell-check your document and then double-check the in-text citations and references to ensure accuracy.
Chapter Three
What are In-text Citations?
When we talk about academic writing, there are two major areas of concern: citations and references. So, what exactly is a "citation"? Also known as "in-text citing", it refers to how you should acknowledge the source of information when you write an article. Let us take a look at the following example:
In some cases, product lines have had defective rates of greater than 25% (Smith and Susan, 2010).
Here, you are telling your readers that according to researchers John Smith and Mary Susan who published their research findings in 2010, the product lines have had defective rates of greater than 25%. It is important for you to acknowledge the source of information lest the readers think that you conducted the research yourself. Furthermore, your readers may want to know why it is 25% and how this observation is made. By citing the source, your readers can look up the corresponding research article in your reference list to learn more. Citation also gives proper credits to the researchers.
I flip open the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Marketing and find this good example of citation on page 36:
Prior research has shown that a lenient product return policy potentially creates a competitive advantage for the retailer or manufacturer (Padmanabhan and Png 1997) and increases a customer's likelihood to purchase a product in the first place (Chu, Gerstner, and Hess 1998; Nasr-Bechwati and Siegal 2005). However, a lenient product return policy is not always ideal (Wood 2001), because it can lead to more product returns (David, Hagerty, and Gerstner 1998) and to "abuse," which can cost the firm more than it benefits (Rust, Zahorik, and Keiningham 1996).
To some, the above paragraph may look a little bit strange and very difficult to read. However, it is a well-written piece academically speaking because it includes proper citations. In my opinion, it is better to over-cite than under-cite because you would not want to commit plagiarism (i.e. presenting others' idea as your own). Of course, you only cite relevant sources so do not list more than five or six papers per citation unless all of them are relevant and influential. If the information is a fact, such as "the sun rises from the East" or "Sushi is a Japanese dish", then you do not need to cite this public knowledge.
In addition to citing reference details at the end of a sentence, you can also consider the following sentence structures:
- As Smith (2010) has pointed out, the ...
- According to Smith (2010), this ...
- Smith (2010) argues/outlines/states/suggests that ...
- In a study in 2010, Smith showed/illustrated that ...
If the article that you are referring to is written by several authors, you will see the word "et al." being used starting from the second citation of such article. The first citation will always show the last name of all of the authors. For example, let us say an article is written by four researchers named John Smith, Mary Susan, Peter Lee, and Tommy Kim. If John is the primary author, the first citation will be (Smith, Susan, Lee, & Kim, 2010) and then (Smith et al., 2010) will be used in subsequent citations of this article in your paper.
How About Quotes?
Some students like to use quotations very often. In some problematic cases, they just copy and paste a large chunk of text into their papers to make up the word count. I think this is not a good writing practice. Paraphrasing is a better option in my opinion. That is, you should rewrite someone else's ideas in your own words to support your arguments or points. If you absolutely need to quote another person's thoughts directly in your paper, please limit it to only a few short sentences. Moreover, remember to show the year of publication and page number that the quote was originally shown in the article. Here is an example of a "Regular Quote" that is embedded in a paragraph:
As Smith (2010) notes, "Canada is a multi-cultural society that is made up of people from all walks of life" (p. 78).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AVOIDING PLAGIARISMby Ken K. Wong Copyright © 2011 by Ken K. Wong. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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