7. Managing attribution, citation, plagiarism and scholarship

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Terms and concepts to know for this section:

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; for more information, go to https://www.plagiarism.org/article/what-is-plagiarism Links to an external site.

Paraphrasing - interpreting the meaning of something one has read in one's own words; learn more and practice your own paraphrasing skills at https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-paraphrasing.html Links to an external site.

In a previous section 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:

1. 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.
2. 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

You will learn how to properly create and format citations in Module 2: Understanding and Using Citations.

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: