Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism/In-class activity
Searching the Literature and Including Citations and References
For your homework, you were asked to review information about the three main types of plagiarism, and how these can be avoided. You were also asked to read information and watch videos about identifying different types of sources.
Activity 1 (10 minutes)
Take part in a discussion with your classmates and instructor(s) about the three main types of plagiarism. What are they? Have you ever committed any of these before without realizing? How can you avoid plagiarism in your essays?
Activity 2 (15 minutes)
First, take part in a brief discussion with your classmates and instructor(s) about the differences between primary, secondary and tertiary sources. Why are primary sources usually preferred for use in essays and scholarly writing? Are any tertiary sources useful or reliable? Why/why not?
Second, form groups of 4-6 people, and take turns to fill out a table of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources that you each found to support the development of your essays.
When filling out the second column (How might you use this?), think about how the information contained in this source applies to the scientific controversy that you are writing about; specifically, try to outline how you could use this source to provide a reason and evidence to support the thesis of your argument. You should explain this to your classmates as you fill in the table.
| Source | Example | How might you use this? |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | ||
| Secondary | ||
| Tertiary |
Activity 3 (10 minutes)
Take part in a discussion with all of your classmates and instructor(s) about the sources that you found. Are they suitable for inclusion in your essays? Why/why not? How are you going to find more sources to help add content depth to your essays?
Activity 4 (10 minutes)
Work with a partner to try to paraphrase some of the information in one of your sources (preferably your primary source); remember the video you watched before class about integrating sources in your work – it is important in science essays to reword what has been written in a source and then attribute the idea to the author(s) of that source.
For now, try to just reword the key information so that it could be included in the main body of your essay. For a more complete guide to attributing the information to the author(s) of the source from which it came, please read the following if you have not already done so: Integrating and Citing Sources.
It is important that you learn the correct format for including citations in your essay, and for compiling the references list at the end.