Week Three Blog: Citations and Plagiarism

During the last past two classes, I have learned (and retained) a lot more than I have from any of the other previous classes. On Tuesday, Amanda went into great detail about scholarly journals which was very helpful. For example, one way to tell if the information is a scholarly journal is if it is published by University Press, as well as, if the text looks boring and if the title isn’t very appealing, odds are that it is a scholarly journal. Although it may be difficult to read, and hard to stay focused on the text while reading, scholarly journals are the best resources for information because they have a majority of facts about the topic or event, and the information is always accurate. On Thursday, Bonnie shared a great deal of information about plagiarism which may be the most important topic I should learn during my college career. Citing the information that you find is so critical because one, it gives credit to the person who worked so hard on the research in order for others like yourself to use, and two, if you use information that isn’t common knowledge to others, or that you didn’t personally find, without citations, you could fail the course or have to deal with more severe consequences. One thing that I didn’t know was that even if you are paraphrasing someone else’s work or ideas, you still have to cite them even if you aren’t using the information word for word. Although there are a lot of rules that come along with citations and plagiarism, it is something that is very important to research and you can’t forget to use it. However, most of the library’s website, along with the databases that you have to find your research on has premade citations next to the webpage, so ironically all you have to do it copy and paste it into your paper.