Engineering

When in doubt, cite.

Avoiding Plagiarism

If you don't cite your sources properly, you are plagiarizing, a violation of the Academic Integrity Code outlined in your Student Handbook

"Plagiarism is intentionally or knowingly presenting the work of another as one’s own (i.e., without proper acknowledgment of the source). The sole exception to the requirement of acknowledging sources is when the ideas, information, etc., are common knowledge."

Some examples of plagiarism include:

  • Buying a paper online
  • Passing someone else's paper off as your own
  • Copying all or part of any previous work without proper acknowledgment (citations)
  • Using images (photos, graphs, figures) in presentations, reports, or posters without asking permission and adequately crediting the creator

Resources

Citation Management Tools

Using a citation tool early in the research process can make it much easier to avoid inadvertent plagiarism.  Citation management tools enable researchers to capture bibliographic information about research materials, create bibliographies, add footnotes, and manage research collections.  Some citation management tools also make it easy to share references with other researchers.  

RefWorks logo

RefWorks is an online citation management tool that allows you to collect, manage and organize research papers and documents.

With RefWorks, you can:

  • Collect & Import: Save an unlimited number of references by importing from online databases, catalogs, websites, and your computer
  • Manage your Research: Organize, retrieve, read and annotate documents and references
  • Share & Collaborate: Share folders and work with others simultaneously
  • Write & Cite: Generate bibliographies and citations in thousands of citation styles, including MLA, APA and Turabian

 

Other Citation Management Tools

EndNote Web bibliographic software allows you to collect and organize references, format a bibliography, collaborate with others, and export references to an EndNote account.EndNote is commonly used in the sciences because it has several built-in science databases.

EasyBib is an automatic bibliography composer.  When you have sources you need to cite properly for a research paper, EasyBib will help format the sources quickly and accurately.  Millions of students use EasyBib to cite sources for their papers.

Zotero is a free, open source ctiation manager that works as a browser plugin and also as a stand alone applicaiton on your computer. Zotero's browser plugins can automatically extract citation information from websites, library catalogs, databases, and more.  It also allows users to save PDFs, images, screenshots and notes along with the citation records.