Having gone to an academic magnet school, I have quite a few friends who are teaching at the university level now. And every so often I see a post by one of them about a plagiarism issue. This is in college, where the student handbooks clearly have language about what is and is not plagiarism. If the student handbooks don't, then the English courses often cover this information. Yet they still see papers which obviously contain plagiarized content if not the whole paper being plagiarized. And of course, we've had several Twitter firestorms in the SQL Server community in recent months over on-line plagiarism. Thankfully, I haven't seen any of my content be plagiarized. I know, I know, that could be looked at two different ways. I'll choose to mislead myself with the positive one. 🙂
After one of the firestorms, I remember saying, "This guy is a college graduate! Surely he knows what plagiarism is!" Then after the one yesterday, I stopped and thought about the fact that my friends who are professors are still seeing the problem, too. So this invaldates my previous statement. Just because someone is a college graduate, that's no guarantee that said person understands what plagiarism is and isn't. So I threw together this blog post as a resource linking to other resources. If you're looking to quote someone else's content, aggregate content, or the like, hopefully these references will help you steer clear of the plagiarism issue.
What is Plagiarism?
- Avoiding Plagiarism, from Southwestern University - A good resource to get you started with links to other resources.
- What Is Plagiarism? from studyclerk.com - A digest version that presents a good synopsis of what is and isn't plagiarism.
Blog Plagiarism and How to Avoid:
- Info on Blog Plagiarism from DailyBlogTips.com - Focused primarily on the writer, but gives information on what not to do if you're not producing the original.
- Info on Clearly Identifying the Source from Steve Jones - Steve shows what is clear and not clear about identifying sources.
- Brent Ozar's FAQ on Plagiarism - Which reminds us it's not okay, even if you don't make any money off of it or don't know how to use the software fully.
