Research: Avoiding Plagiarism: How to Avoid Plagiarism

Plagiarism can be intentional or unintentional. Use these steps to help you avoid plagiarism:

1. Use your own original ideas and opinions. Only repeat another's words exactly when it is particularly relevant to your topic.
2. Use quotation marks when you are using a direct quote.
3. Paraphrase other's ideas in your own words, but be sure to cite it!
4. Cite your sources. When in doubt, cite it!
5. Ask for help from a librarian or your professor. 
    

How can I tell whether I’ve plagiarized?

If you still aren’t sure whether you’ve plagiarized, double-check your work using the checklist below.

You need to cite your source, even if:

• you put all direct quotes in quotation marks.
• you changed the words used by the author into synonyms.
• you completely paraphrased the ideas to which you referred.
• your sentence is mostly made up of your own thoughts, but contains a reference to the author’s ideas.
• you mention the author’s name in the sentence.

**The moral of this handout: When in doubt, give a citation.**

Source: UNC at Chapel Hill Writing Center

The standard definition says you plagiarize when you use somebody else's ideas or texts as if they were your own. Chat GPT is not plagiarism insofar that it is not copying the work of someone else outright.

In the case of using AI-generated text, you're not really using the work of another person, however you are pretending you wrote text that you didn't. This behavior is referred to as 'AI-assisted plagiarism'. it is cheating in the sense that if you use an answer or essay generated by the chatbot, you have not created the work yourself.

Is it Plagiarism Yet?

Cite Sources