Essentially, plagiarism involves taking credit for someone else’s ideas, words, images, media, art, or any part of someone’s work without identifying the creator. Good ideas are often built on the ideas of others, but it is important to make clear:
- What you found
- What ideas/previous creations led you to your idea
- What you created.
Why?
This allows you to demonstrate 4 different types of skills:
- That you can find and identify information to meet your goal
- That you can understand that information
- That you can put this information together (or synthesize it) to come up with another idea
- That your original ideas are built on and connected to other good ideas.
To do these things well, you need to cite your sources and the tools you used to help you with your ideas. Citations in your actual writing lets instructors know which sentence or idea comes from which source. A reference or works cited section should come at the end of the writing.
The citation within your writing or text is called an in-text citation. It is usually a brief pointer to a source or tool. The citation at the end of your work provides more details, allowing the reader to find the source/tool if they are interested in learning more and/or to see how your idea builds on the ideas in that source/from that tool.