Library Guides
Library Guides
What is referencing?Referencing is the way that you describe the sources of information and ideas that you use in your assignments.
Plagiarism is using someone else's work as your own — even if you put their work into your own words.
Your assignments are going to be full of you referring to other people's work, ideas, diagrams, pictures etc. That is what you are supposed to do. But everything that you don't identify as belonging to someone else, you are claiming as your own work. So if you omit a reference to anything that you didn't originally create, then that is plagiarism.
Is it still plagiarism if I put it in my own words?
It is still plagiarism if you put someone else's work in your own words without referencing it.
Is it plagiarism if someone helps me with my assignment?
Yes, unauthorised collaboration is plagiarism. Sometimes you may have to do group assignments in which case you must acknowledge the contribution of the other students.
What about images? graphs? music? art? photos from the internet? statistics?
You have to reference all of these and anything else you did not originally create
Intentional plagiarismThis includes copying someone else's work, buying assignments online, paying someone else to write something for you etc. Unintentional plagiarismThis is much more common. This often happens when you...
Avoiding unintentional plagiarism - write your references as you go
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Writing your references as you go will also save you a huge amount of time because you always think you will remember where you got the information from... but you never will.
Students often say that it takes them just as long to write their references at the end as it took them to write their assignment!
What are the penalties for plagiarism?The penalties for plagiarism can include...
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How does the university check for plagiarism?
Most universities including JCU use anti-plagiarism software to check your assignments. This checks to see if any part of your assignment has been submitted before or is on the internet. The anti-plagiarism software that JCU uses is called SafeAssign. You will find a link to submit your assignments to the SafeAssign dropbox in all of your LearnJCU subjects. Some lecturers also provide a Draft SafeAssign dropbox so you can submit a draft of your assignment to check for accidental plagiarism before you submit your assignment to the Final SafeAssign dropbox. Make sure that everything that is identified as someone else's work is correctly referenced. |
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Unfortunately there are many different referencing styles, each with a slightly different layout, punctuation, use of capital letters and italics, spaces etc.
Your lecturer normally specifies which referencing style they want you to use. The most commonly used referencing styles used at JCU are APA and AMA (Vancouver). Other styles used at JCU include Harvard, Chicago, MLA and AGLC.
So you need to find out which style you are using in each of your subjects (hopefully you will be using the same referencing style for all of your subjects, but this is not always the case)
JCU library has a bunch of referencing guides (Guides) including one for each of the referencing styles used at JCU.
Go to the JCU Library page and click on Guides, then type in Referencing or the name of your referencing style i.e. APA, AMA, Harvard, MLA, Chicago etc.
Each guide contains many examples of how to reference specific resources i.e. books, journal articles, web content etc.
JCU library has a bunch of referencing guides (Libguides) including one for each of the referencing styles used at JCU.
Go to the JCU Library page and click on Guides, then type in Referencing or the name of your referencing style i.e. APA, AMA, Harvard, MLA, Chicago etc.
Each guide contains many examples of how to reference specific resources i.e. Books, journal articles, web content etc.
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