Greening Our Campus -- Fall 2022: Avoiding Plagiarism

Online documents make it very easy to cut and paste information without thinking and without giving proper credit. Make sure you understand how to cite your sources.

The APA Format Resource below is a collection of resources compiled by Dr. Ghosh to help with your research projects.

APA Format Resource

Purdue Online Writing Lab is a great place to go for detailed help about APA formatting.

• APA Style Guide
• 1 page summary of APA style
• Citation Machine will help provide accurate citations

Excelsior College Writing Lab - APA Style

American Psychological Association( the people who created APA Style)

• Help for InText Citations
• Student Paper Checklist
• Student Paper setup Guide  
• Paper Format helps provide examples for the small things that can be done incorrectly: Order of pages, fonts, page headers, line spacing and more. 

Microsoft Word APA template – Word makes it easy to use APA format when using the APA template.

The Gingrich Library’s page Citation Tools lists links to Citations guides as well as links to Citation Generators including  BibMe, EasyBib and Zotero.

• Do not spell out author's first or middle names. Use first and middle initials only.
• Double space all references.
• Use a hanging indent for the first line of each reference.
• Capitalize the first word of the title, the first word of the subtitle and proper nouns.
• Alphabetize the reference list by the last name of the author.

When it is time to gather all of your notes and start writing the paper, avoid the most common mistake - plagiarism. Plagiarism is not only taking large parts of someone else's work and not attributing credit to that author; paraphrasing sections of a work, even using synonyms and citing the work, is also plagiarism.

• Use direct quotations to support the paper's thesis.
• Rethink and rewrite the author's original idea and express it in a new way.

Even if the ideas are rewritten, the source of the idea must be cited and the author given credit.

For more information about how to avoid plagiarism, see this video at our Research Den.