Why Do I Have To Do That? Scholarship, Attribution, Citation, and Plagiarism
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Why Do I Have To Do That? Scholarship, Attribution, Citation, and Plagiarism
Terms and concepts to know for this lesson:
Scholarship - academic study, work, or achievement. What faculty and students in academia create or produce.
Discourse - written or spoken communication or debate. The process through which ideas are communicated, debated, and spread.
Attribution - the act of crediting a work to its author, date, and place of creation. Giving credit to the original creator of content.
Plagiarism - taking the thoughts and words of others and representing them as one's own original thoughts.
In the previous lesson How Do I Even Read That? Understanding Scholarly Articles, you learned strategies for how to approach scholarly articles that you find during your research. After reading some of the articles you find during your research, you'll inevitably find some to be useful enough that you'll want to use them as evidence when presenting your argument. One of the most important aspects of conducting research is keeping track of the citation information for all the sources that you consulted during your research. Why are citations such an important part of conducting research?
How scholarship is made
No piece of scholarship is ever created in a vacuum. Scholars, including student researchers, rely on the work done by previous researchers in order to create new knowledge. As such, when creating a research assignment, you can think of yourself as responding to previous scholars in the field; previous discoveries and claims influence the directions of future research. Consequently, you can think of a scholarly article as a conversation between the author of the work, and the researchers who studied the topic previously. Collectively, we call this conversation scholarly discourse. Whenever you create a research assignment, you're joining into that discourse.
But what does that have to do with citations?
Citations serve two primary purposes:
- They give proper attribution to the original creator of a piece of content. In that way, citations are a recognition that ideas have value. By citing the author of a work, you are giving credit to that author.
- They increase the cogency of your argument. Including citations demonstrates to your audience that you are not making your ideas up in a vacuum; rather, your ideas are the result of examining published information on the topic, and are corroborated by other experts in the field. By including the full citation information, you also allow your audience to locate the source and ascertain that it supports the argument you are advancing
About plagiarism, briefly
Including citations and a works cited page will help you avoid plagiarism, which is taking the thoughts and words of others and representing them as your own original thoughts. Here at UMD, we often talk about how plagiarism is bad, and the dire consequences that can face students who plagiarize. But that raises two important questions:
- Why is plagiarism wrong?
- It hurts the original creator of the content
- It's dishonest
- Cite your sources
What does plagiarism look like?
However, you don’t have to copy a direct quote to commit plagiarism. You can alter the words and phrases used by the original work, but if don’t give the original author credit, you are still committing paraphrase plagiarism. When it comes to plagiarism, it’s not the words that matter – it’s the ideas. What does paraphrase plagiarism look like? A recent example caused a stir on Twitter.The tumblr feed Borrowing Sam Links to an external site.exposed user @prodigalsam, a popular figure on Twitter, as joke thief. @prodigalsam paraphrased content just enough that it would avoid quick Google searches, and then would wait several months before posting the plagiarized content.
This caused a huge controversy, because the Twitter community has conventions for reusing someone else content, such as Retweets (RT), Favorites, and Modifed Tweets (MT). @prodigalsam willfully ignored those conventions in an attempt to make this content look like his own creation. This purposeful violation of the spirit of sharing content is the same reason why there are consequences for plagiarizing content in academic works, which is why citing the authors' whose ideas you use in your research is so important. You're recognizing the value of that author's work, and giving the author the credit her or she deserves.
It is also possible to commit self plagiarism if you re-use a work you have previously completed, without acknowledging that the work is being re-purposed. To avoid this unfortunate situation, if you are referencing previous work you have completed, cite yourself! @prodigalsam also was guilty of self plagiarism: