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Advanced Information Research Skills

Academic misconduct

This involves representing another person's ideas or work as your own. It may also include resubmitting your own work for another assessment item. These examples of plagiarism have been taken from the Policy Student Academic Integrity that you can download from Academic Integrity at Notre Dame

  • Plagiarism of ideas - claiming credit for someone else’s thoughts, ideas or inventions.
  • Word-for-Word plagiarism - copying the exact expression of someone’s writing or a very close approximation to it.
  • Plagiarism of sources - using another person’s citations without acknowledging the source of the citations.
  • Plagiarism of authorship - claiming to be the author of an entire piece of work such as an article, an essay, a book, a musical composition which has been fully or substantially authored by another (Martin, 2004, p.3). 
  • Self-plagiarism – the submission of work (for assessment) previously submitted but claimed as original work. 

 

Martin, B. (2004). Plagiarism: policy against cheating or policy for learning? Retrieved on April 1, 2020 from http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/04plag.pdf

Other forms of failing to undertake your studies with academic integrity, include: 

  • giving or providing your work for sale to someone else 
  • misrepresenting, falsifying or fabricating data for an assessment 
  • using assessment materials from someone else (whether purchased or taken) 
  • colluding (working very closely) with other people to produce an assignment and then submitting it as your own individual work 
  • collaborating (working on an assignment) with others where it is not authorised in the assessment requirements 

Information in the above section adapted with permission from University of Leeds (UK).

 
Notre Dame's plagiarism detection software for higher degree research (HDR) candidates is Turnitin

The Guideline: Presentation and Submission of Research Theses in Section 4.1 requires all HDR candidates to submit their thesis to the University’s text-matching software, Turnitin, and share the resultant report with their supervisory team.
HDR candidates can access Turnitin through the Research Office Blackboard Community site (under My Communities on the left hand side of the Blackboard Welcome page). All HDR students should have access to this site via Blackboard, which can be accessed via the Current Students page. 


See the Plagiarism & copyright links below for critical information about plagiarism for researchers at Notre Dame.

Referencing

Correct referencing can help you avoid plagiarism.

The two components to academic referencing are in-text citations and the reference list.  See the Library’s instructional referencing guide.

Selection of a presentation format and referencing system should be made in consultation with the Supervisor and in line with the conventions of the discipline in which the student is writing. Preference should be given to the University-endorsed referencing styles.

In-text citations offer the reader a link to the original author’s work within the paragraph you are writing: 

In-text numbered style: Nutrition during childhood and adolescence is essential for growth and development, health and well-being. [1,2] Further, eating behaviours established during childhood track into adulthood and contribute to long-term health and chronic disease risk. [3,4].
(from this article)

In-text APA style: These young people arrive with identifiable forms of cultural capital which have not been recognised in previous educational settings. Some have musical abilities, some are involved with Hip-hop culture (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002), or Goth culture (Hodkinson, 2002), some have computer gaming abilities; some are members of sub-cultural groups such as BMX, Skate and Surf cultures.
(from this article)

The Reference List (or List of References) at the end of a written work should list every source cited in that work.

Only references cited within the body of the text should appear in the reference list. Omit from the final thesis any reference material that you read but did not cite. Your bibliographic management software will ensure that only in-text citations appear in your reference list. 

A bibliography includes both cited works, and works read but not cited.

Activity – Establish a referencing style

Check with your supervisory team which referencing system you should use.

For samples of in text referencing and reference lists used in your faculty you may view theses from other students in ResearchOnline@ND. Once you know which referencing style you will be using, make sure you record sufficient detail of each reference so that you avoid searching for them again. 

At this stage you should consider which bibliographic management tool you will use to keep track of your references (see Module 7.1 Bibliographic management). A HDR thesis commonly has hundreds of references, so some time spent at the beginning can save you many hours towards the end of your degree.