Plagiarism Avoidance Using APA Format

Plagiarism

According to UMUC's Policy 150.25 - Academic Dishonesty and Plagiarism, "plagiarism" refers to

the intentional or unintentional presentation of another person's idea or product as one's own. Plagiarism includes but is not limited to the following: copying verbatim all or part of another's written work; using phrases, charts, figures, illustrations, or mathematical or scientific solutions without citing the source; paraphrasing ideas, conclusions or research without citing the source in the text and in reference lists; or using all or part of a literary plot, poem, film, musical score or other artistic product without attributing the work to its creator. (University of Maryland University College, 2006, IV.B.1)

So any paper, presentation, etc. that you create that includes information or ideas that are not your own (apart from widely known facts, such as Abraham Lincoln's birthday, the membership of Congress, etc.) should contain citations that indicate where the information came from. Citing your sources will help prevent you from committing plagiarism.

UMUC Policy 150.25 states:

Students can avoid unintentional plagiarism by carefully following accepted scholarly practices. Notes taken for papers and research projects should accurately record sources of material to be cited, appropriately quoted, paraphrased or summarized, and papers and research projects should acknowledge these sources in the appropriate places in the text of the paper as well as in a reference list at the end of the paper, in accordance with accepted citation practices. (University of Maryland University College, 2006, III.C)

For a better understanding of how to avoid unintentional plagiarism, please see:

• the UMUC Effective Writing Center's How to Avoid Plagiarism tutorial
• the UMUC Virtual Academic Integrity Laboratory's Academic Integrity and Dishonesty Policies: What Every Student Needs to Know guide
• the Indiana University School of Education's How to Recognize Plagiarism guide

Keeping Track of Your References

It is important that you keep track of the information that you collect during your research to avoid committing inadvertent plagiarism.

Many databases allow you to save your search strategy and/or search results. You may also e-mail citations and/or articles to yourself. Check the help pages of a database to see what features it offers for saving information from your searches.

APA Citation Style

"APA style" refers to a system of documenting your research by formatting your citations in a specific way.

Click below to watch a short video, "APA Citations."

For more information about APA citations, including examples of APA citations for various types of material, please see APA Citation Examples.

There are two kinds of APA citations:

• Reference list citations appear at the end of your paper and list all of the sources that were used in your paper, either through paraphrasing or through direct quotation
• In-text citations appear within the body of your paper and point your reader to the corresponding citation in your reference list

Reference List Citations

Here is an example of an article citation from the database Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition. This citation is not in APA format. Following the image is a discussion of how to change the database citation into an APA citation.

The database citation gives you all of the information that you need to create an APA citation:

• Author: Authors' names should be written with each author's last name first, followed by his or her initials, with & preceding the final author's name for articles written by more than one person: Lo, B., & Parham, L.
• Publication date: For articles from scholarly journals, only the publication year should be given in your citation, and it should be put in parentheses: (2010).
• Article title: Only the first word of the article's title and any proper nouns should begin with a capital letter: The impact of Web 2.0 on the doctor-patient relationship.
• Journal title: The journal title should be put in italics, and all major words should begin with a capital letter: Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.
• Volume and issue numbers: The volume number should be put in italics, and the issue number should follow it immediately (with no space in between). The issue number should be in regular font, and it should be placed in parentheses:38(1)
• Page numbers: The page range of the article should be given: 17-26.
• DOI (digital object identifier; this is a unique article identification number): The DOI should follow doi: (in lowercase letters, with no space between doi: and the DOI), with no period at the end of the DOI: doi:10.1111/j.1748-720X.2010.00462.x

Do NOT include anything else that is not in this list. Do NOT include the publication number, the ISSN, the accession number, the permanent link, the date retrieved, or the name of the database.

An article's DOI can sometimes be found on the first page of the article's PDF, although it can sometimes be found in the article's database record:

A complete APA citation for the article mentioned above should look like this:

If the article did not have a DOI, the 6th edition of the APA Publication Manual says that your citation should provide a retrieval statement consisting of the words Retrieved from followed by the home page URL of the journal in which the article was published.You can find the home page URL of a journal by entering its name into a search engine such as Google:

If the article mentioned above did not have a DOI, its citation should look like this:

For more information about how to cite articles with and without DOIs, please see Citing an Article with a DOI and Without a DOI.

NOTE: Some of the library research databases try to format citations for you in APA, MLA, Chicago style, etc. Unfortunately, these citations are prone to errors and are often incorrectly formatted. If you use this feature of the databases, do not assume that the citations are formatted correctly. Please follow the UMUC Library's samples for how to format your citations according to APA, MLA, Chicago styles, etc. Those are the rules that UMUC follows, not the formats generated by UMUC's library research databases.

In-text Citations

Here are three different ways that you can create the first occurrence of an in-text citation for the article mentioned above:

Web 2.0 health innovations are just beginning to be adopted (Lo & Parham, 2010).

Lo and Parham (2010) believe that Web 2.0 health innovations are just beginning to be adopted .

As described in a 2010 article, Lo and Parham believe that Web 2.0 health innovations are just beginning to be adopted .

In each case, you are clearly directing your reader to the correct citation in your reference list. When you are quoting directly from an article, you must also give the page number where the quoted material appeared in the original article -- for example:

"Although Web 2.0 health innovations are still in their early stages and have not been widely adopted, now is the time to consider the ethical and policy issues they raise concerning the doctor-patient relationship" (Lo & Parham, 2010, p. 18).

RefWorks The UMUC Library subscribes to RefWorks, a Web-based program that can help you manage your references and can be used to create reference lists and in-text citations in a variety of citation styles. Although RefWorks is a useful tool, it is not infallible. You should have a good understanding of proper citation style when using RefWorks so that you can double check the citations that it generates.

The UMUC Library's Getting Started with RefWorks guide provides step-by-step directions for using this program.

Reference

University of Maryland University College. (2006, September 5). Policy 150.25 - Academic

dishonesty and plagiarism. Retrieved from

http://www.umuc.edu/policy/academic/aa15025.shtml