Plagiarism and Referencing (Who, Where, Why, What, When, How) – How I would enlighten a new college student.

Referencing and Plagiarism is the scariest part of third level college for me, I find it very hard to get my head around it. Although I would never deliberately plagiarize, it scares me to think that if not done properly, it can cause serious issues in college. Our lecturer Mr David Cooke always advises us to use the five W’s; these can be used for presentations, essays, referencing etc.

When referencing, I think of it as story telling and find the five W's very helpful, an example of this is 

image source: referencing and plagiarism (electric/eccentric, 2010)

• Who told me?
• Where did it take place?
• Why 
• What did they tell me?
• When did it happen?
• How did they tell me?

                                                                                                 

Plagiarism and Referencing is of major importance in Third Level Education. Each college or institute will have their own set of guidelines on plagiarism and referencing.

Firstly let's look at what they are,

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is applying someone else's work, ideas, theories etc. and claiming it as your own work.

Referencing

Referencing refers to the practice of acknowledging the sources in which you got your information from, such as books, journals, newspaper articles and so on.

Citations 
A citation is how we tell our readers that certain material in our work came from other authors; it also gives them the necessary information to find the source. (Plagiarism 2012) 

Personally I think a new student should familiarize themselves with the concepts of plagiarism and referencing by the following, 

• Familiarize themselves with Itb's policies on plagiarism and referencing.
• Download Itb's referencing guide for students.
• Download the Harvard Referencing examples: Staffordshire University.
• Most importantly, attend all of David Cooke's lectures on plagiarism and referencing.     

I think with the above points in mind, this should help a new student acquaint themselves with plagiarism and referencing.

Our lecturer Mr David Cooke also gave us really great advice on plagiarism and how to reference properly. He also gave us an extensive amount of resources that are available on Moodle. One source in particular I found really helpful was the Harvard Referencing examples Staffordshire University, as it shows exactly how to reference books, websites, blogs, journals etc. More information can be found here (Staffordshire University, n.d.)

References
Electric/Eccentric (2012) Sunday Salon, Plagiarism or Creativity [Online] Image, Available at: http://www.eclectic-eccentric.com/2010/04/sunday-salon-plagiarism-or-creativity.html. [Accessed 11th November 2012]

Plagiarism (2012) What is Plagiarism [Online] Available at: http://plagiarism.org/. [Accessed 11th November 2012]

Staffordshire University (n.d.) Harvard Referencing System [Online] Available at:  Refehttp://www.staffs.ac.uk/assets/harvard_referencing_examples_tcm44-39847.pdfrencing. [Accessed 10th November 2012]