Academic Integrity

Academic Integrity is a code of ethics in academic work. In other words, having academic integrity means not cheating, copying, plagiarizing, being dishonest, or otherwise taking credit for work that is not your own. A basic understanding of copyright, plagiarism, Fair Use, and citations will help you maintain academic integrity in your work. It's also helpful to understand Creative Commons, a relatively new alternative to copyright.

Copyright

U.S. Copyright Law exists to balance the rights of creators to make money off of their work with the rights of society to benefit from the wisdom and creativity of individuals.

Quick facts about copyright:

Anything a person creates is automatically copyrighted to that person. This means you hold the copyright for everything you have ever written, drawn, or recorded!
Images, movies, songs, and other creative works are also copyrighted. The artist, director, or musician holds the copyright--even if you bought a copy.
Ideas cannot be copyrighted until they have been turned into something real. It doesn't matter who had the idea first, only who made something out of the idea.
If you use someone else's words or ideas, you have to give them credit through a citation and, in most cases, you also need to get their permission to use it.
There are limits on how much of someone else's work you can use, even if you give credit. It depends on what the work is, how much you use, how you share it, and why you share it. Find out more under Fair Use

Find out more about copyright from CopyrightKids and or by solving the Copyright Mystery.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is using someone else's work without giving proper credit. Plagiarism is a crime because it is stealing someone else's work, so don't do it! Plagiarism includes copying another student's work, using someone else's ideas or words without giving credit, or otherwise turning in someone else's work as your own.

You can avoid plagiarism by:

Always doing your own work
Participating and contributing in group projects
Not copying or cheating
Citing your sources when you get information from someone else such as from a book, interview, Web site, or article.

Want to know more about plagiarism and how to avoid it? Check out What Is Plagiarism? and When Your Writing Isn't Your Own.

Fair Use

Fair Use is the part of U.S. Copyright Law that allows you to defend your use of someone else's work without asking their permission. In academic research, Fair Use is what allows us to use someone else's ideas and words (as long as we give them credit by citing our sources!) without asking them first. There are four factors that are considered when determining if something counts as Fair Use: the purpose of the use, how widely the original work was distributed, the effect on sales of the original work, and the amount of the original work that was used.

The balance between Fair Use and Copyright is not always clear and is often decided in court. To help explain it is A Fair(y) Use Tale, a video montage created through the fair use of clips from some familiar movies.

Citations

When using someone's words or ideas, you must cite the source that you got the words or ideas from. This helps your audience know where to find more information and it also gives credit to the people who's work you have built upon. There are lots of different styles of citations, but the most common one in school is MLA Format. You can use a citation tool to help you cite your sources so that you do not have to memorize all of the citation rules. Roeper subscribes to the citation tool NoodleTools, which you can log into from any web browser. Stage IV students have accounts with username as firstname.lastname and password as your student ID number. Others may email Carmen to have an account set up for them.

Since we don't have to memorize all the rules, the trickiest part of citations is knowing where to find things like the title, author, and publisher to plug into the citation generator. Books usually follow the same pattern so that all of this information can be found on the front and back of the title page. Web sites are trickier because the information can be anywhere or not there at all! Here are some hints that might help you find what you need to cite a Web site:

Author: If you are using an online news source like The New York Times or CNN, the author will usually be listed near the top or bottom of the article. If your source comes from an organization such as the United Nations, the author might be the organization. Sometimes there is no author listed at all, so you leave the author blank.

Specific Web page, article, or document title: This is usually found near the top of the page in large or bold type. This title describes what is on this specific page, not the entire Web site. For example, right now you are on a specific Web page called "Citations & Copyright."

Web site name or title: This refers to the entire Web site, not just the specific page. For example, the Web site you are on right now is called "Flora Middle School 638." The Web site name can usually be found at the top of every page of the Web site and is often the name of the organization or company that is responsible for the Web site, such as National Geographic, Smithsonian Institute, or Flickr. This is not the URL.

Publisher or sponsor: It is important to know who the publisher or sponsor is because this can help you determine what the purpose or agenda of the Web site is. This information can usually be found at the very bottom of the page near a ©. If not, see if there is a page on the Web site such as About Us, Copyright, or Terms of Use that might explain who is responsible for the Web site. This is often a company or organization. If it is a person, try to figure out if this person is a trustworthy expert. Remember, anyone can pretend to be anything online!

Publication date: This is when the page you are using was published or updated. For news articles, the date can usually be found near the author's name. For blogs, the date is usually near the blog post's title or at the very end of the post. For most other types of Web sites, look at the very bottom of the page for the ©. The year or date next to the © is the publication date.

URL: Please copy and paste the URL when you cite a Web site so that it is easy to find the source again. You can copy the URL from the browser bar and paste it into your citation generator.