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The American Psychological Association (APA, 2020), notes, to avoid plagiarism, be sure to provide credit to a source using the author-date citation system, whenever you:

• directly quote a source
• state the ideas of a source in your own words i.e. paraphrase
• reprint or adapt a table or figure, including those freely available on the internet or licensed in Create Commons
• refer to data or data sets
• reprint a long-text passage or commercially copyrighted test item (p. 255).

What is Plagiarism?

To represent oneself as the author of some work that is in fact the work of someone else is to plagiarize. Plagiarism may include the “passing off” of the form of the work—for example, the exact words of a piece of writing—or the intellectual content, or both.

Plagiarism exists as a serious social problem within the halls of Western academia. Only exceptional circumstances bring plagiarism of someone outside of academia to public attention. Plagiarism is an ethical, not a legal, issue and it does not equate with the breaking of copyright or patents, though at times both may also involve plagiarism. The advent of the World Wide Web and vast electronic databases brought this issue to the fore within academic institutions, resulting in new methods of both plagiarism and detection. The global nature of the Web and the increase in transcultural education through the movement of students and scholars has increased awareness of a cultural dimension to plagiarism.

Pickering, J.(2008). Plagiarism. In Encyclopedia of social problems. Retrieved from http://search.credoreference.com/content/topic/plagiarism

Did you know Grammarly has a plagiarism checker?

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If you experience any issues in creating your account, please email: askwculibrary@westcoastuniversity.edu

Did you know, Learning Express (LEX) has a quick plagiarism tutorial?

LEX Plagiarism Resources

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