John Powell | Dept of Strategy & Management | Leicester Business School
last upated 3/7/08
Accurate referencing is key to academic credibility and success. Despite our expectations, perhaps, plagiarism (whether intended or 'accidental') is still apparently rife. However, it is also apparent that students will get caught increasingly often. For instance, one large module found 74 separate instances of "poor academic practice" on one assignment, which resulted in those students failing that assignment.
The university has subscribed to JISC's Plagiarim Detection Service (known as TurnItIn) and it has become the norm that written assignments will have to be submitted through the JISC engine which generates an 'originality score'. It has certainly made my marking less time consuming! We have already seen many instances where the Turnitin has identified highly plagiarised final year essays. Your best defence against being accused of plagiarism is good referencing - any fact, quote, idea, concept, diagram etc that is not uniquely your own MUST be referenced, both in the text and in a reference list at the end of the essay/report etc.
UEL offers a good online resource on Harvard referencing (concisely expressed but a long list)
University of Sheffield's Citing electronic sources of information [HSL-DVC2] (pdf)
Zotero
This is a free Firefox plugin - yet another reason not to use IE. It's especially useful for capturing reference info from online sources and can export in Harvard format.
EndNote
Very heavy duty bibliography software that works with Word etc.