Citation Style Guide: Academic Integrity & Avoiding Plagiarism

Academic integrity is important because it means you are trustworthy and honest in your academic career. It is essentially a reflection of your character. When it comes to writing and research, having academic integrity means you properly give credit to the original sources and ideas used to formulate your argument/research. 

Plagiarism means you use someone else’s work/ideas in your research paper and pass it off as your own by failing to give proper credit to the author/creator. It is academic dishonesty and can potentially affect your class grade and/or academic standing with the college.

When you use the words, ideas, charts, graphs, data sets, numerical information, or phrasing of another person or published material, you should give credit to the original author and always acknowledge that source. This means you should:

• Quoting: Cite the source and enclose the words in quotation marks.

         OR

• Paraphrasing/ Summarizing:  Paraphrase or summarize the part you are using, and cite the source.

 For more information on plagiarism and how to avoid it, Click on Preventing Plagiarism, and there are some examples for quoting and Paraphrasing, too.