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Related Sites

About Plagiarism:

• Indiana University: This is a good site for explaining what is and is not paraphrasing as well as how plagiarism, even when unintentional, can occur.
• Western Illinois University: A fair, albeit sparse, site created by Bruce Leland, Knowledge Coordinator at Western Illinois University. This site includes a short list of suggestions on working with students about the uses and abuses inherent in the Internet as well as a link to a much more extensive list (also listed below). There is also a series of links to some of the free term- and research-paper sites.
• University of Virginia: This site was created by Lou Bloomfield, professor of physics at the University of Virginia. It contains a survey designed to assess the depth and breath of plagiarism on university campuses.
• Indiana University: This short site contains exercises in how to paraphrase.
• Purdue University: Although this site is a series of pages, each with long lists of links, the resources available at the end of those links are well worth the effort. Purdue has put together a series of handouts on everything from sentence structure and punctuation to how and when to quote and site sources. The site was created for Purdue's OWL (Online Writing Lab) and is an excellent source for any teacher (or student) wishing to be better prepared and informed.

Services that Catch Plagiarism

Safeassignment.com: UNC pays for this service for teachers and students to check papers for plagiarism.

EVE: This web-company sells a software package and 'shareware' for $19.95 per teacher, unlimited use. The software is fairly user-friendly and pretty accurate in what it finds. However, the papers need to be saved as text-only or ASCII text, and if the search finds negative results, it returns only a listing of the sites where matching text strings were found. The URLs of these sites are linked, meaning the user simply has to click on the listed URL to access the site, but then the user also has to search through the entire site word-by-word until the matching text strings are located. One word of advice on this software: do not submit the reference sections with the papers, for that will give false positives for most URLs listed in any reference sections, as well as some that are references for books and articles. The load-in and turn around time for this service is fairly quick--all told, for 30 papers, it took just over 7 hours total from start to finish (load-in: 2.5 hours; results returned in 4.5 hours).

Styles of Attributing Ideas

Every professor at UNC requires papers to follow a style of crediting authors. Some prefer MLA, some APA, and some just want a consistent, recognized style. In any case, here are the basics of the styles.

MLA (Modern Language Association)

The basics: This extremely helpful four-page guide was put together by the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The site: www.mla.org

APA (American Psychological Association)
The basics are on the site at www.apastyle.org