Plagiarism & cheating
The University of Manchester has a zero-tolerance approach to plagiarism. Submitted work is systematically and automatically checked for plagiarism. In recent years several Computer Science students have been convicted of plagiarism and the University reduced their degree classifications as punishment. If you cheat or commit plagiarism you will be caught.
Further reading
In addition to this page ensure you read
Overview
The School is continually checking for cases of plagiariasm and cheating. If you are found to have committed either offence you will get into serious trouble with the University.
- Don't ever be tempted to cheat in your exams.
- Never be tempted to take text or images from the Web; or anywhere else; and use it uncredited in any work you produce.
Plagiarism Is:
- Quoting sections of text, verbatim, without attribution is plagiarism.
- Cutting and pasting parts of other texts, diagrams et alia and presenting this as your own work is plagiarism.
- Taking a source text and moving, adding, deleting or changing a few words is plagiarism.
- Finding an essay on, for example, the World Wide Web, printing it and handing it in with your name is serious plagiarism. It is a waste of your time and of the time of the people who will impose disciplinary action.
- Submission in whole or in part of your own work where that work has been previously submitted for a different assessment. This is known as 'self-plagiarism'.
Plagiarism Isn't:
- Reading a number of references, assimilating the information and using this background knowledge is not plagiarism; this is normal academic practice. In such instances it is both useful to a reader and polite to an author to reference works that were particularly useful.
- Quoting part of a text is not plagiarism, providing that it is made clear that this is a quotation and the source is acknowledged. (The same rule should be applied to diagrams, figures etc.) In such cases the quotation should be short, relative to the context in which you use it.
Computers make plagiarism easy to detect. If you can use Google so can your tutors. You have very little to gain by trying this and a lot to lose. Don't plagiarise!
How to reference properly and avoid plagiarism
1. Introduction
For a variety of reasons, Computer Science students do not properly reference material in written work. This leads to them plagiarising externally sourced material, and therefore committing the extremely serious offence of Academic Malpracice.
The Student Handbook [UG] [PG] has a whole section devoted to explaining Academic Malpractice and plagiarism and the School's policy on it.
We will not rehearse here the arguments concerning why plagiarism is unacceptable; you should refer to other documents on plagiarism if you wish.
Instead, we think it would be useful to see an example of two versions of the same short essay:
- the first attempt fails to reference externally-sourced material properly.
In particular we include the results of submitting the essay to the TurnItIn plagiarism detection tool.
- the second attempt improves on the referencing, although arguably, because of the quantity of quoted material, it is still a very poor essay (but at least the author does not commit plagiarism).
As you are hopefully already aware, the consequences of committing Academic Malpractice, including plagiarism, are severe: at a minimum you are likely to have the mark for the exercise in question set to zero. For third years, the case is determined at Faculty or University level, where further penalties may be applied, such as the lowering of a degree class, or even expulsion from the University. Any incident will be recorded on your Student Record, and may be used in the future, for example when giving job references.
2. How Not To Do It
Imagine that you have been set the following essay assignment:
Write a 300 word essay on the contribution to the IT Industry made by a notable leader within the industry, for example the head of a large IT company such as Microsoft, Apple or Google.i.e. similar to the current 2nd Year Reading Week Essay.
Here is a first attempt:
Title: Steve Ballmer: Microsoft CEO Author: Toby Howard Version 1, March 22nd 2007 Steven Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman. He was born on 24 March 1956 in Detroit, Michigan, and has been the CEO of Microsoft since January 2000. Ballmer is the first person to become a US dollar billionaire based on stock options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was neither a founder nor a relative of a founder. Ballmer graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and economics. While in college, he managed the football team, worked on the Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the university literary magazine, and lived down the hall from Bill Gates. He is not a stranger to controversy. According to reports, Mr Ballmer vowed to "kill" Google in an expletive-laced, chair-throwing tirade when a senior Microsoft engineer told him he was leaving the company to go work for Google. He has been quoted as saying: "I like to tell people that all of our products and business will go through three phases. There's vision, patience, and execution." From 1980 to 1998, Steve Ballmer was the head of several Microsoft divisions, including operations, operating systems development, and sales and support. In July 1998 he was promoted to President, and in January 2000 he became Chief Executive Officer, a position previously held by Bill Gates. He is famous for his Monkey Dance at a show in 2001. After 40 seconds of jumping around, Ballmer finally settled behind the lectern to catch his staggered breath. "I have four words for ya," he said, breathing heavily. (I thought he was about to say, "Get me a doctor!") But ever the inspirational leader, he gave the audience what it wanted. "I...love...this...company...yessssssss!" So that's all you probably need to know about Steve Ballmer.
2.1 TurnItIn Originality Report
The above essay has been submitted to the TurnItIn system, which generates an `Originality Report'. This shows an extremely high copied proportion, of 76%.
On checking the material copied from external sources, it is clear that none of it has been properly referenced, in other words, numerous instances of plagiarism have been committed.
TurnItIn then generates a report, essay-bad-turnitin-report.html, in order to highlight copied material. In this, the first table gives the list of sources, showing the percentage of copied material and the reference found for the source. The second table shows the essay, annotated to highlight the copied sections. The material from the various sources is colour-coded and numbered to help identify these.
(note that the links in the second table have been removed, since they are not accessible by you).
As you can see, the essay consists almost entirely of large sections of material cut and pasted from external sources, with the occasional linking phrase. On inspection none of the copied material is referenced. This is not an acceptable way to produce the essay.
3. An Improved Version, Referencing-Wise
We now produce a version of the essay to show how sources should be referenced properly. Now, all directly quoted material is included in quotation marks and labelled (in this case using bracketed numbers such as [1]) to indicate which reference is used. A new section `References' has been added, which includes the labelled list of all references used. The reader can now see exactly which material has been taken from external sources and the location of these sources.
However, note that because so much of the text has been take verbatim from sources, the essay now looks very strange, with almost all of it marked as quoted material.
Clearly this would not be acceptable for a submitted essay (it would now probably get a very low mark, of perhaps 20%), since it contains far too much external material, i.e. with little input from the author.
It could be improved by summarising or paraphrasing the external material, and then adding in the author's own work for analysis/criticism and so on.
Note: even for summarised and paraphrased sections, the original source of the information should of course still be referenced.
Also, note that all of the sources are on-line sources. Again this shows poor researching -- even with the marvels of Google and the World-Wide Web, a good essay would usually refer to material from other media, i.e. text books, journals and so on.
3.2 New Version
Title: Steve Ballmer: Microsoft CEO Author: Toby Howard Version 2, March 22nd 2007 Steven Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman. He was born on 24 March 1956 in Detroit, Michigan, and has been the CEO of Microsoft since January 2000. According to [1], "Ballmer is the first person to become a US dollar billionaire based on stock options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was neither a founder nor a relative of a founder." According to [2], "Ballmer graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and economics. While in college, he managed the football team, worked on the Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the university literary magazine, and lived down the hall from Bill Gates." He is not a stranger to controversy. According to reports, "Mr Ballmer vowed to "kill" Google in an expletive-laced, chair-throwing tirade when a senior Microsoft engineer told him he was leaving the company to go work for Google." [3] He has been quoted as saying: "I like to tell people that all of our products and business will go through three phases. There's vision, patience, and execution." [4] From 1980 to 1998, Steve Ballmer was the head of "several Microsoft divisions, including operations, operating systems development, and sales and support. In July 1998 he was promoted to President, and in January 2000 he became Chief Executive Officer, a position previously held by Bill Gates." [5] He is famous for his Monkey Dance at a show in 2001. According to [6], "After 40 seconds of jumping around, Ballmer finally settled behind the lectern to catch his staggered breath. 'I have four words for ya,' he said, breathing heavily. (I thought he was about to say, 'Get me a doctor!') But ever the inspirational leader, he gave the audience what it wanted. 'I...love...this...company...yessssssss!' ". So that's all you probably need to know about Steve Ballmer. REFERENCES 1. Anonymous, undated. Steve Ballmer [online]. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer [Accessed 21 March 2007]. 2. Anonymous, undated. Steve Ballmer [online]. Broadpoiint Technologies. Available from: http://www.broadpoint.net/page.ww?section=Convergence&name=Keynote+Speakers [Accessed 21 March 2007]. 3. Anonymous, undated. Steve Ballmer [online]. Available from: http://blogbybob.com/archive/2005/09/08/2094.aspx [Accessed 21 March 2007]. 4. Anonymous, undated. Woopidoo! quotations [online]. Available from: http://www.woopidoo.com/business_quotes/business-quotes.htm [Accessed 21 March 2007]. 5. Anonymous, undated. Steve Ballmer [online]. Available from: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/A-E/Ballmer-Steve-1956.html [Accessed 21 March 2007]. 6. AnchorDesk Staff, 2001. ZDNet AnchorDesk Friday, August 24, 2001 [online]. Available from: http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2807333,00.html [Accessed 21 March 2007].
4 An Example of How To Do Referencing in LaTeX
LATEX of course has numerous ways of supporting referencing. The best way is to give a quick example using the most direct approach, of including the formatted bibliography list within the main body of the LATEX source file.
First, wherever a citation is used within the text, a `cite' command is inserted to include the label for the associated reference, for example:
According to \cite{ballmer-wikipedia}, "Ballmer
is the first person to become a US dollar billionaire based on stock
options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was
neither a founder nor a relative of a founder."
In this case the label for the reference is
`ballmer-wikipedia'.
Then at the end of the document, the list of labelled references is given within a `thebibliography' environment, in whatever order they are required:
\begin{thebibliography}{99}
\bibitem{ballmer-referenceforbusiness}
Anonymous.
Steve ballmer [online].
URL
\url{http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/A-E/Ballmer-Steve-1956.ht%
ml}.
Accessed 21 March 2007.
\bibitem{ballmer-wikipedia}
Anonymous.
Steve ballmer [online].
URL \url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer}.
Accessed 21 March 2007.
.
.
.
\end{thebibliography}
Here, each reference in the list starts with the `bibitem'
command, which takes the label to be used in the main text for that
reference. The `99' argument to the environment tells LATEX how wide the maximum label width is so that it can align the list of
references. The `url' command (defined in the
`url' package) treats its argument as a URL, and may produce
an active link for use in electronic versions of the document.
Note that each entry gives the details required for each reference: author (`Anonymous' in most cases), followed by the title of the reference (`Steve Ballmer' in most cases), the URL and the date it was accessed. You should ensure you develop a consistent and recognised referencing style.
4.1 LaTeX Version of Good Essay
The LaTeX version of the `good' essay is as follows:
%% Time-stamp: </home/alanw/Teaching/Plagiarism/How-To-Reference/new-essay-good.tex; alanw@cs.man.ac.uk; 10/12/2007>
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{a4-mancs}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{url}
\title{Title: Steve Ballmer: Microsoft CEO}
\author{Author: Toby Howard}
\date{Version 2, March 22nd 2007}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
Steven Anthony Ballmer is an American businessman. He was born on 24
March 1956 in Detroit, Michigan, and has been the CEO of Microsoft
since January 2000. According to \cite{ballmer-wikipedia}, "Ballmer
is the first person to become a US dollar billionaire based on stock
options received as an employee of a corporation in which he was
neither a founder nor a relative of a founder."
According to \cite{ballmer-broadpoint}, "Ballmer graduated from
Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and
economics. While in college, he managed the football team, worked on
the Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the university literary
magazine, and lived down the hall from Bill Gates."
He is not a stranger to controversy. According to reports, "Mr Ballmer
vowed to "kill" Google in an expletive-laced, chair-throwing tirade
when a senior Microsoft engineer told him he was leaving the company
to go work for Google." \cite{ballmer-blogbybob}
He has been quoted as saying: "I like to tell people that all of our
products and business will go through three phases. There's vision,
patience, and execution." \cite{ballmer-woopidoo}
From 1980 to 1998, Steve Ballmer was the head of "several Microsoft
divisions, including operations, operating systems development, and
sales and support. In July 1998 he was promoted to President, and in
January 2000 he became Chief Executive Officer, a position previously
held by Bill Gates." \cite{ballmer-referenceforbusiness}
He is famous for his Monkey Dance at a show in 2001. According to
\cite{ballmer-znet}, "After 40 seconds of jumping around, Ballmer
finally settled behind the lectern to catch his staggered breath. 'I
have four words for ya,' he said, breathing heavily. (I thought he was
about to say, 'Get me a doctor!') But ever the inspirational leader,
he gave the audience what it wanted.
'I...love...this...company...yessssssss!' ".
So that's all you probably need to know about Steve Ballmer.
% Insert the references here.
\begin{thebibliography}{99}
\bibitem{ballmer-znet}
AnchorDesk Staff.
Zdnet anchordesk [online], Aug 24, 2001.
URL
\url{http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2807333,00.html}.
Accessed 21 March 2007.
\bibitem{ballmer-blogbybob}
Anonymous.
Steve ballmer [online], undated.
URL
\url{http://blogbybob.com/archive/2005/09/08/ballmer-steven.aspx}.
Accessed 21 March 2007.
\bibitem{ballmer-broadpoint}
Anonymous.
Steve ballmer [online], undated.
URL
\url{http://www.broadpoint.net/page.ww?section=Convergence&name=Keynote+Speakers}.
Accessed 21 March 2007.
\bibitem{ballmer-referenceforbusiness}
Anonymous.
Steve ballmer [online], undated.
URL
\url{http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/A-E/Ballmer-Steve-1956.html}.
Accessed 21 March 2007.
\bibitem{ballmer-wikipedia}
Anonymous.
Steve ballmer [online], undated.
URL \url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer}.
Accessed 21 March 2007.
\bibitem{ballmer-woopidoo}
Anonymous.
Woopidoo! quotations [online], undated.
URL
\url{http://www.woopidoo.com/business_quotes/business-quotes.htm}.
Accessed 21 March 2007.
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}
4.2 Using bibtex
An alternative way uses the `bibtex' system. This allows much more flexibility in terms of the style in which the references are given, since you are able to build up a general database of your references in a `.bib' file and then apply various bibliography `styles' for the references which are required within a particular document. The `bibtex' program is then used to create the list of references in the required style.
You first need to create a `bibtex' reference database, called something like myrefs.bib. For each reference you need to give the full citation; for example:
@MISC{ballmer-wikipedia,
AUTHOR = "Anonymous",
YEAR = "undated",
TITLE = "Steve Ballmer [online]",
PUBLISHER = "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia",
URL = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer",
NOTE= "Accessed 21 March 2007"
}
where `ballmer-wikipedia' is the key you will use to identify this reference within your main text.
Then, include the following in your main LaTeX document preamble:
\usepackage{natbib}
\usepackage{url}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
This tells LaTeX to use the `natbib' package for processing
references, using the `plainnat' style (note: there are
numerous other packages and styles available). The 'url'
package is there to handle any URLs in your references.
In your main text, to insert a label to cited material, include the `citep' command which takes some key as an argument; for example:
\citep{ballmer-wikipedia}
The `citep' command does a slightly different job to the
`cite' command used previously.
In the place in your document where you want the list of references, put the command:
\bibliography{myrefs}
where `myrefs.bib' is the name of your reference database.
Now, having run the `latex' command (or pdflatex to produce PDF) on your document, you then need to run the `bibtex' command. You will then need to re-run `latex' one or more times in order to synchronise the various auxiliary files.
The resulting document can be found at essay-good.pdf.
Further information on bibtex or the natbib package is available at: /home/teTeX/texmf/doc/helpindex.html
4.3 Small Example Bibtex Database
The 'bibtex' database file, holding reference information is now given. This includes a small sample of the different kinds of material which can be referenced (apart from the on-line ones in the essay):
@BOOK{lamport-latex,
AUTHOR = "Lesley Lamport",
TITLE = "\LaTeX\ User's Guide and Reference Manual",
YEAR = "1994",
PUBLISHER = "Addison-Wesley"
}
@ARTICLE{DBLP:journals/fac/Lamport94,
AUTHOR = {Leslie Lamport},
TITLE = {How to Write a Long Formula (Short Communication).},
JOURNAL = {Formal Aspects of Computing},
VOLUME = {6},
NUMBER = {5},
YEAR = {1994},
PAGES = {580-584},
BIBSOURCE = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}
@INPROCEEDINGS{DBLP:conf/www/PrevitaliLW01,
AUTHOR = {Luca Previtali and
Brenno Lurati and
Erik Wilde},
TITLE = {BibTeXML: An XML Representation of BibTeX.},
BOOKTITLE = {WWW Posters},
YEAR = {2001},
EE = {http://www10.org/cdrom/posters/1090.pdf},
BIBSOURCE = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}
@MISC{ballmer-wikipedia,
AUTHOR = "Anonymous",
YEAR = "undated",
TITLE = "Steve Ballmer [online]",
PUBLISHER = "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia",
URL = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer",
NOTE= "Accessed 21 March 2007"
}
@MISC{ballmer-broadpoint,
AUTHOR = "Anonymous",
YEAR = "undated",
TITLE = "Steve Ballmer [online]",
PUBLISHER = "Broadpoint Technologies",
URL = "http://www.broadpoint.net/page.ww?section=Convergence&name=Keynote+Speakers",
NOTE = "Accessed 21 March 2007"
}
@MISC{ballmer-blogbybob,
AUTHOR = "Anonymous",
YEAR = "undated",
TITLE = "Steve Ballmer [online]",
URL = "http://blogbybob.com/archive/2005/09/08/ballmer-steven.aspx",
NOTE = "Accessed 21 March 2007"
}
@MISC{ballmer-woopidoo,
AUTHOR = "Anonymous",
YEAR = "undated",
TITLE = "Woopidoo! quotations [online]",
URL = "http://www.woopidoo.com/business_quotes/business-quotes.htm ",
NOTE = "Accessed 21 March 2007"
}
@MISC{ballmer-referenceforbusiness,
AUTHOR = "Anonymous",
YEAR = "undated",
TITLE = "Steve Ballmer [online]",
URL = "http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/A-E/Ballmer-Steve-1956.html",
NOTE = "Accessed 21 March 2007"
}
@MISC{ballmer-znet,
AUTHOR = "{AnchorDesk Staff}",
YEAR = "Aug 24, 2001",
TITLE = "ZDNet AnchorDesk [online]",
PUBLISHER = "ZDNet",
URL = "http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2807333,00.html",
NOTE = "Accessed 21 March 2007"
}