CITING ALL SOURCES - GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

How To Avoid Plagiarism Documenting And Crediting Information Sources

Thanks to the Internet, electronic periodical databases, and the like, we now have almost instant access to incredible amounts of information. We also have search tools that, although far from perfect, enable us to swiftly find information on very specific topics and issues. But fairness, intellectual property rights, academic honesty and copyright law generally ** REQUIRE that we ALWAYS explicitly credit and attribute sources of information. **

In other words, we must always clearly identify when and where we have used information from any source, and also identify exactly where we got it. Whether intended or not, failing to credit and document can push us into outright plagiarism taking credit for someone else's work as our own.

Park University is so concerned about this problem that it is pushing instructors, especially online instructors, to systematically check student work for failure to credit sources. As such, anyone writing anything, especially a research paper, needs to be VERY CAREFUL to never give the impression that exact words, paraphrasing, or even information taken from some other source is their own. The ONLY information you use that does not require a citation is what is considered "common knowledge." Common knowledge is information that the "average person" knows, such as: The sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

Thus, you are expected to research weekly topics and include what you find in your Discussion postings and Peer Responses. You must reference any and ALL of your sources; including your text book! Copying and pasting or even paraphrasing information you find from any text source or on the Internet without the use of quotation marks and proper citations is plagiarism and will not be tolerated, as is clearly so indicated in the syllabus. NOTE: When referencing your source for information, you should provide the source AND the page number(s) where the information was obtained from.

I request that you follow APA format for citing your sources and posting your references used. The easiest way to cite any source in your postings, as far as this course is concerned is to provide your source at the end of the paragraph where you have used the above mentioned information. For example, if you use information from our textbook in your Discussion Question response or Peer Response, cite your source at the end of the paragraph as (Wheelen & Hunger p. 48, 2008). If you use any other source besides our textbook, you must use the entire information about that source, such as (Pallof & Pratt (2003). The Virtual Student. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. p. 47.) NOTE: In