Understanding academic integrity and plagiarism

Providing clear references is vital both to highlight to others where your evidence has come from, and to avoid any form of plagiarism.

What is academic integrity?

In this video, Emma introduces the concept of academic integrity and explains why it is taken so seriously by universities and therefore why being able to effectively reference your work is so important.

Have a look at the University of Southampton’s regulations governing academic integrity and, in particular, the principles that you should apply in the development of your research project.

Exercise: choices and consequences

Practice applying the regulations using these exercises. Try taking the part of Barry, a first year student, as he faces some difficult situations in the ‘Choices and Consequences’ interactive story. You must make his choices and face the consequences. Unlike real life, you can always ‘try again’ if things don’t turn out they way you’d hoped!

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is copying ideas and text from sources without proper citation and references. You can avoid unintentional plagiarism by making sure you know how to correctly cite and reference other people’s work.

Through this week’s activities we encourage you to:

• find a style of referencing that is appropriate for your subject or one that you find easy to follow and use

• investigate online tools like Mendeley to see how they can help you in recording your referencing

• consider when and what you need to reference and to take our short quiz to see what you already know