What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is a serious form of academic misconduct. It involves both appropriating someone else’s work and passing it off as one’s own work afterwards.  Thus, you commit plagiarism when you present someone else's written or creative work (words, images, ideas, opinions, discoveries, artwork, music, recordings, computer-generated work, etc.) as your own. 

People's ideas may be contained in:

• written text (journal articles, books, theses, dissertations, newspapers, magazines, notes, course material, students' projects, e-mail messages, data, computer code, everything on the internet, etc),
• visual text (books on fine art, graphics, photographs, etc),
• multimedia products (websites, videos, films, CDs and DVDs, etc),
• music (compositions, lyrics, CDs, DVDs, music or sound bites on the internet, etc), and
• spoken text (speeches, audio recordings, lectures, interviews, etc).

• Types of plagiarism