Academic integrity is honesty and responsibility in scholarship. 

This is an ethical issue that is observed by both faculty and students and results in various "conventions" in how we represent scholarly research.

Several tutorials on academic integrity are available.  Here are two:

York University offers an Academic Integrity tutorial at http://www.yorku.ca/tutorial/academic_integrity/

Indiana University offers an Understanding Plagiarism tutorial at http://education.indiana.edu/~frick/plagiarism/

When you plagiarize, you present others' ideas, words, or intellectual property as your own.  Whether this is on purpose or a mistake, it's still plagiarism.   Examples:

• you quote someone else's published work as if you wrote it yourself
• you paraphrase someone else's work without letting your reader know where you got it
• you represent someone else's creation as if it was yours

To avoid plagiarism, simply acknowledge your source in footnotes and a bibliography.  That's where the "conventions" come in.

A convention is simply a standardized and accepted way of presenting something, such as a footnote or citations in a bibliography.  There are a number of conventional ways of presenting your sources.  The most commonly used are MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association), but there are a number of others that you may be asked to use in different courses.  The books describing the MLA and APA formats are behind the reference desk in the library, but there are also some online places to look.  Here is the Cal State East Bay web site that gives you links to various options:  http://www.library.csueastbay.edu/citing.htm#research

copyright Aline Soules 2007

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