Avoiding Plagiarism/What is Plagiarism/Examples

An Example: If you are reading a journal article written by Deane and Reilly, and in that article these authors paraphrase material from another author like this: “Nolan and O’Sullivan (2003) argued that white mice were more likely to be caught by predators than brown mice,” you must rephrase the paraphrased material from Nolan and O’Sullivan to avoid plagiarising Deane and Reilly (because it was their interpretation that Nolan and O’Sullivan had argued this point).

Finally, it is also possible to commit plagiarism by badly misinterpreting/misquoting someone when providing a citation (even if this is not purposeful). As a result, it is very important that you pay special attention to the work of others when citing it in your own work; it is very important that your paraphrased piece of writing does justice to the original material.

An Example: In this guide, we wrote that sometimes students commit plagiarism unknowingly. If someone was to credit this guide with a proper citation but paraphrased our words inaccurately, they would be plagiarising the material (e.g. “More often than not, students commit plagiarism unknowingly (UBC Science Writing, 2014)” is plagiarism, because this misrepresents what the guide says, and propagates inaccurate information among whomever reads the article).