Avoiding Plagiarism/What is Not Plagiarism/Examples

An Example: You need to rephrase Deane and Reilly’s paraphrased sentence referring to the work of Nolan and O’Sullivan (2003) because that was original, published material. However, if Deane and Reilly opened their article by saying that: “mice are small mammals,” you do not need to worry about writing something different to get the same point across, because this is a universally acknowledged fact (it is not an original idea of Deane and Reilly’s that you must credit them for).

This links in to the next point: You do not need to cite material that is factual (and well known), or which can be filed in the category of ‘general knowledge.’

What does and does not fall under ‘general knowledge’ can be hard to know, especially when you are starting out as a science writer, but the two key things to keep in mind are 1) the audience you are targeting, and 2) how specific your information is.

1: Your Audience: You should cite material that is unlikely to be familiar to your audience, to make sure that you do not pass off the ideas of others as your own. However, a public talk, or a journalistic article, or a presentation to high-school students will involve audiences with very different background knowledge about your subject than a presentation to specialist researchers working in the same discipline as you.

An Example: You would not need to cite Charles Darwin’s most famous work when talking to a group of evolutionary biologists about evolution (as long as you are not referring to something very specific that Darwin did or said), but if you were presenting work to those high-school students, you probably would (because they might very well not have read Origin of Species and might not realize you were talking about Darwin’s ideas if you didn’t).

2: How Specific is your Information? Even if you are talking to specialists in your field, they might not have all read the latest (or even the more obscure) published material. As such, you should cite anything that you think is very specific, because it is unlikely that it would be generally known.

An Example: You would need to cite Darwin’s most famous work if you mentioned the specific sizes of the finches’ bills in the different populations found on different islands of the Galapagos, as this is very specific information (note: Darwin proposed that birds on different islands had evolved different beak sizes, within a few mm of each other, as they became adapted to the unique food resources on each island). You would need to cite this whether you were talking to evolutionary biologists or to the high-school students because of its highly specific content.