Plagiarism

Yes, that old chestnut, the same old hackneyed harangue we've heard forever. In the old days, a paper meant going to the library, getting half a dozen books, spreading them out before you and lifting paragraphs from each, trying to connect them together in a cogent way, change the words and word order sufficiently (or use quotes when that was too hard to do), then footnote properly and list the sources in the reference section. Not doing those things properly was plagiarism. In graduate school, sources came from the latest journal article on a topic, then listing the sources that the article used. In a doctoral program, you at least dug up the abstracts.

Now, it's all about web searches. There are some good encyclopedic sources such as Wikipedia, About.com, and others, which provide excellent descriptive but not analytical information. Sadly, college students all-too-often don't go beyond the first few hits on the search, then take sections of these low-level sources and figure they're covered if they just list the sources at the end (at best). This isn't the place to review your eighth grade discussion about how to cite and reference, what is common knowledge, what is a quote, etc., but use some common sense here. If it's not part of class or what the average person would know and it's not your original thought, you need to give credit to who did think of it.

Yes, it's a boring blog entry, but we are so tired of reading papers that are intentionally or unintentionally plagiarized. I just read a plagiarized paper (from Wikipedia); the paper was on ethics.