How to Recognize and Avoid Plagiarism

Richard L. Saunders, Paul Meek Library

Univ. of Tennessee at Martin

Plagiarism and Electronic Media

Scholarly databases and the World Wide Web have become rich and accessible sources to allow professionals to communicate about their work and to help students learn. Both are great source of information for student writing. Both professors and students are justifiably concerned about avoiding plagiarism since it is easy to copy electronic text and images. Keep in mind that if it is easy to locate material to support a research and writing assignment, it is just as easy for a professor to locate and document the source you exploited.

In most cases, the same standards apply to using electronic media as to printed sources: when you refer to ideas or quotes from an online article or Web site, cite that source. Most style manuals now include sections on citing online material. The same responsibility for making correct citation applies when a writer uses a graphic object from a Web site. Images or graphics from a Web site (or from a printed source) can be documented like quoted text, and the source of the visual information or graphic must be cited.