Good academic practice

Citing and referencing

Most forms of academic writing involve demonstrating that you understand concepts and the debates surrounding them. This kind of scholarship involves drawing on, and giving credit to, other people’s work through citing and referencing.

Paraphrasing others’ ideas requires citing the author and year, such as (Smith, 2011). If using someone else’s exact words, these words need to be in quotation marks and the citation needs to have a page number along with the author and year, such as (Smith, 2011, p. 34). A reference list at the end of your paper should feature the publication information for each of the citations.

The organisation plagiarism.org also has some very helpful resources and their website is well worth a visit.

Three principal kinds of academic misconduct are common in student assignments:

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is using others’ ideas or words without properly attributing them to the original source.

 

Self-plagiarism

Self-plagiarism is using your own work that has previously been submitted for assessment or publication.

 

Collusion

Collusion is where two or more students each submit work that they have written together (or that one has taken from the other), but which has not been part of a group project.

The majority of the above kinds of academic misconduct occur unintentionally. The University, however, takes academic misconduct very seriously and does not distinguish between what was intentional and what was not. It is your responsibility to make sure that you are entirely aware of how to cite appropriately.

This may seem like a personal creation, but it is really just a more nuanced form of plagiarism. Doing an Originality Check on your assignment can be very revealing and we recommend that students use this function on Turn-it-in.

10 Types of Plagiarism (1.33 MB PDF)

Turn-it-in (TII)

Turn-it-in (TII) is a software package used primarily for submitting and marking academic papers. One of its features is its capacity to scan submitted student assignments for matches against an ever-increasing repository containing over 45 billion websites, student papers, and academic publications.

Although some see the Originality Check as a way of catching cheaters, we view it as a means for students to improve their academic writing. By submitting a version of your paper to a course’s Turn-it-in Dropbox, you will be able to see your Originality Report and consider how you might amend your assignment.

Turn-it-in has written and video instructions on how to check your paper’s originality score. Do keep in mind that Turn-it-in only lets you do this once every 24 hours! Also, be aware that the actual percentage of text matching is not particularly illustrative. It is possible that high matches may not contain plagiarised material and vice versa.

Top tips for Turn-it-in (TII)

(views held by the Moray House School of Education and Sport - other Schools and Universities may differ)

1. You can re-submit your paper as many times as you like before the submission deadline. Each submission in the same dropbox over-rides the previous one – earlier submissions don’t enter the TII database.
2. You can ‘test scan’ your paper for originality in the assignment dropbox before finally submitting, but only once every 24 hours. Beware though, particularly in the final 24 hours, as you won’t be able to do that one final check.
3. There is no ‘safe’ percentage of matching. Some papers might have 40% similarity and not have any plagiarism, if quotes and references are included. On the other hand, a paper with 9% might have big chunks that were cut and pasted from somewhere else, and clearly point towards academic misconduct.
4. Don’t submit a ‘test’ submission to another dropbox that you might have access to. Once you do this, your paper will enter the TII database and your actual submission will have a high degree of text-matching, which will raise self-plagiarism alarm bells.
5. Use TII as a ‘friend’. If you see that you have large swathes of matching text, this can show you where you either need to use your own words to express the same idea (and cite this with author and year, of course) or put some of these words into quotation marks (and cite this with author, year, and page number, of course).

The Academic Misconduct process

If your course tutor has reason to suspect that your work has been plagiarised, your assignment will be referred to the School Academic Misconduct Officer (SAMO). He or she will decide if your case is a major one or not. If the SAMO judges that there is evidence of academic misconduct, and if you are a third or fourth year undergraduate or a postgraduate student, your case will almost certainly be referred to the College Academic Misconduct Officer.

Academic misconduct procedures

Step-by-step process of what happens if your assignment is referred.

Academic Misconduct Procedures (pdf)

Further information

Our assumption is that if students have good academic writing skills, they will be much less likely to unintentionally plagiarise. If you have explored the above resources and would like more guidance on good academic practice, please contact your personal tutor or the School Academic Misconduct Officer.