Three main reasons may be identified why (correct) citation is that important in academic writing, and why you need to check carefully that what you tell in your story of the information from your cited authors is an accurate representation. First, you demonstrate your understanding of the different concepts that you have learned and afterwards applied in the text. Secondly, the reader can retrieve the different sources you refer to in the text for further research or other purposes. You too would be very grateful for the research of your final thesis if you could easily retrieve the sources from another author’s work. The third reason is to avoid being charged of plagiarism. This last reason may need some further explanation.
Plagiarism is the deliberate or unintentional reporting of facts, opinions, ideas, etc., as though they were your own. It is a serious academic offence that may have some serious consequences. You may think that academic knowledge is shared, objective knowledge, and is therefore a kind of communal property. Nothing could be further from the truth. When anyone invents something or discovers some new fact, he tries to register that invention or that fact under a patent or through the copyright acts. Music, logos, commercial ideas can all be protected as the intellectual property of the inventor, and these are protected because they are the source of livelihood for the inventor. If the rights are infringed, then the inventor or owner of the rights can take legal action. The same principles apply to academic facts, ideas and opinions: although few academics will make money out of them directly, this academic knowledge does underpin their jobs and career prospects. In the same way, your ideas will lay the basis for your own careers.
While academic knowledge is freely available, it is necessary to give due credit to the source of that knowledge. That makes your own work academic. Why might you fall into the trap of plagiarising? Firstly, you may do so unintentionally. You have forgotten where you found the information, because you have read so much. The solution is to keep careful records of the sources of information that you need for writing a paper. Another unintentional reason is that you may have a false idea of what it means to write a paper. A paper is not simply the assembly of lots of facts and ideas gathered from various sources, and your task is just to put them together. That would be a collection of notes. A paper implies that you are telling your story about that facts and ideas, and you need to identify which pieces of information are yours and which are your sources. Similarly, you may be rather unsure about what is “common knowledge” and what is specific knowledge for which you need to cite a source. This grey line between these areas is difficult to determine, especially at the beginning of your studies. However, the more you advance in your studies, the more you will discover what is the shared common knowledge – you find it as the background in lots of textbooks and articles. In the early stages of your studies, it is wise to cite all the authors of sources, just to be on the safe side.
Secondly, you may plagiarise because you think your own writing is not good enough. While using other people’s work to learn how to write can be beneficial, plagiarism itself will not help you produce a good writing. What you need to do is to learn how to express other people’s ideas in your own words, by trying different structures, by distilling the gist of what an author wants to say and then saying it in your words.
The third reason for plagiarism is much more serious. This is deliberate: you may be under time pressure, or you have other priorities, so you decide simply to copy chunks of text from the sources you read and pass it off as your own work. This is of course easy to do with electronic sources. The trouble is, though, that usually it is also easy to spot: the style of writing changes, the relevant references do not appear in the text as they should, and errors of grammar and interpretation are simply repeated in your work. Worst of all, it does not help you acquire an effective understanding of the sources, nor does it help you develop your own writing style.
Closely associated with this is plagiarising other students and self-plagiarism. You may not think of this as plagiarism; after all, it is just copying text that is not copyright. You may think another student’s work is hardly intellectual property, but it is. Similarly, if you have submitted your own work for one course, you may not submit it again for assessment in another course. This would also be plagiarism. This kind of activity eventually leads to the culprit being excluded from the academic community for life. In the end, doing this means you have destroyed your potential academic career.
Clearly, then, while plagiarising may sometimes seem like the economically viable option in the short term, in the end it is simply not worth your while. The consequences for your academic studies and career and for you as a person are too great. Maastricht University is introducing a university-wide anti-plagiarism policy. Check both the main website of the university as well as on Eleum, tab my SBE, section student A… Z; cheating and plagiarism (including the Exam Regulations) to ensure that you are familiar both with what plagiarism is and how you can avoid committing it.
Wilkinson, R., Hommes, J. (2010). A Guide to Academic Writing Skills. Second edition. Maastricht University. School of Business and Economics.
