PLAGIARISM

 

A Student's Guide to Recognizing It and Avoiding It

 Dr. C. Barnbaum,

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Valdosta State University

Valdosta, GA 31698-0055 USA

 

 

Most of the plagiarism committed by students is unwitting and is due to their ignorance about what constitutes plagiarism. If you do not know exactly what plagiarism is, you cannot avoid doing it. This guide is intended to illustrate plagiarism is in all its forms.

 

There are several different kinds of plagiarism. Most students recognize one form which I call "Copy & Paste Plagiarism," but that is only the most obvious kind. In what follows, I give a brief description of each kind of plagiarism illustrated with examples. The "Source Article" is the published material on the left, and on the right are examples of plagiarized text and text that successfully uses the Source Article as a legitimate reference.

 

Types of Plagiarism considered here:

Type I: Copy & Paste Plagiarism

 

Description: Any time you lift a sentence or significant phrase intact from a source, you must use quotations marks and

reference the source.

                                                           

Source Article:

Copy & Paste PLAGIARISM

Especially since the launch of HST and the unprecedented clarity of the images satellites have given us, you've all seen on the news or in books, beautiful color pictures of various sights in the cosmos. But is this the way you would see these objects if you went there? Well, to tackle that question, first we have to consider the nature of light and color. Light is made of waves of electromagnetic radiation. We perceive different wavelengths of visible light as different colors.

Everyone is interested in astronomical images, especially since the launch of HST and the unprecedented clarity of the images satellites have given us. But is this the way you would see these objects if you went there?   How to use the info without plagiarizing We are all thrilled by the beauty of pictures of the universe taken with space telescopes and other satellites. The pictures display spectacular color and detail, but, as posed in "Source Article" by So-n-so, "is this the way you would see these objects if you went there?"

 

 

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Type II: Word Switch Plagiarism

 

Description: If you take a sentence from a source and change around a few words, it is still plagiarism. If you want to quote a sentence, then you need to put it in quotation marks and cite the author and article. But quoting Source articles should only be done if what the quote says is particularly useful in the point you are trying to make in what you are writing. In the case below, a quotation would not be useful. The person who plagiarized in this example has just been too lazy to synthesize the ideas expressed in the Source article.

 

Source Article:

Word Switch PLAGIARISM

All solid bodies emit light: stars, rocks and people included. The temperature of the star, rock or person determines which wavelength of light will be most strongly radiated. In the constellation Orion, the upper left star is Betelgeuse (Armpit of the giant), 520 l-y distant. Betelgeuse is a supergiant star, 14,000 times brighter than our sun, and so big, if you were to put Betelgeuse in place of our sun, its surface would reach all the way out to Jupiter. Betelgeuse's color is bright red. On the other hand, another supergiant star, Rigel, with a luminosity 57,000 times that of the sun, appears whitish-blue. The reason that Betelgeuse is red and Rigel is blue is that their surface temperatures are different. Hot stars at 30,000 degrees emit a lot more blue light than red light, and so hot stars look blue or bluish-white. Cool stars at 3,000 degrees give off more red light than blue, and so these stars look red.

Stars, rocks and people all emit light, and which wavelength of light will be most strongly radiated depends on the temperature of the star, rock or person. For example, the star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion, Armpit of the Giant, is a supergiant star, 14,000 times brighter than our own sun.   How to use the info without plagiarizing: Everything has a temperature, and everything radiates light, and the two are not unconnected. In fact, the hotter a body is, the more blue light it radiates and the colder, the redder the emission. So what is the difference between red and blue light? It is the wavelength. An interesting example is given in "The Source Article" by So-n-so, where the author points out that the star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion is very red because its temperature is so cool, and Rigel, another star in Orion, is blue because it is so hot.

 

 

Another example of Word Switch Plagiarism:

 

Source Article:

Word Switch PLAGIARISM

Brown dwarfs rank among the most elusive objects in the universe. With masses from about 15 to 80 times that of Jupiter, they are bigger than planets but too small to ignite the nuclear fusion reactions that cause stars to shine.

Brown dwarfs are difficult to locate and rank among the most elusive objects in the universe. Brown dwarfs have masses from about 15 to 80 times that of Jupiter. Scientists have determined that brown dwarfs are bigger than planets, however, they are too small to ignite nuclear fusion reactions which cause stars to shine. How to use the info without plagiarizing: Brown dwarfs are more massive than typical planets but yet are too small to be stars. Stars, by definition, maintain nuclear fusion reactions, which require a large mass.

 

 

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Type III: Style Plagiarism **THIS IS TRAP THAT MOST STUDENTS FALL INTO!**

 

Description: When you follow a Source Article sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph (as is done in the example below), it is plagiarism, even though none of your sentences is exactly like those in the Source Article or even in the same order. What you are copying in this case, is the author's reasoning style. If you were to make a basic outline of the Source Article below and then outline the Style-plagiarized example on the right, you would see that the outlines are the same! Contrast this with the non-plagiarized example, where the information in the Source Article is used only to enhance the point the student is trying to make.

 

 

Source Article:

Style PLAGIARISM

Especially since the launch of HST and the unprecedented clarity of the images satellites have given us, You've all seen on the news or in books, beautiful color pictures of various sights in the cosmos. But is this the way you would see these objects if you went there? Well, to tackle that question, first we have to talk about the nature of light and color.   Light is made of waves of electromagnetic radiation. We perceive different wavelengths as different colors.   All solid bodies emit light: stars, rocks and people included. The temperature of the star, rock or person determines which wavelength of light will be most strongly radiated. In the constellation Orion, the upper left star is Betelgeuse (Armpit of the giant), 520 l-y distant. Betelgeuse is a supergiant star, 14,000 times brighter than our sun. and so big, if you were to put Betelgeuse in place of our sun, its surface would reach all the way out to Jupiter. Betelgeuse's color is bright red. On the other hand, another supergiant star, Rigel, with a luminosity 57,000 times that of the sun, appears whitish-blue. The reason that Betelgeuse is red and Rigel is blue is that their surface temperatures are different.   Hot stars at 30,000 degrees emit a lot more blue light than red light, and so hot stars look blue or bluish-white. Cool stars at 3,000 degrees give off more red light than blue, and so these stars look red.

The beautiful pictures that the space telescope has given us show spectacular color. But is the color real? First, we have to consider what light and color are. Different wavelengths of light correspond to different colors, and light is called electromagnetic radiation. The temperature of an object determines the color of light emitted, and all things, including people, emit light. In the constellation Orion, the star Betelgeuse is a huge, giant star, as big as the orbit of Jupiter. Betelgeuse is red. Another star in Orion, Rigel, is blue. The reason that they are different colors is that they each have a different surface temperature.   Cold stars are at about 3,000 degrees and emit more red than blue light and very hot stars emit blue light since they have temperatures of about 30,000 degrees.     How to use the info without plagiarizing Is there anything we can know about stars by just looking at them without binoculars or a telescope, or are they just really mysterious objects that will always keep their secrets? With only our naked eyes we can see that stars have different colors, from white to blue to yellowish and red; and color does indeed tell us something important about stars. Color tells us a star's temperature. Everything has a temperature, and everything radiates light, and temperature and light are intimately connected. In fact, the hotter a body is, the more blue light it radiates and the colder, the redder the emission.

 

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Type IV: Metaphor Plagiarism

 

Description: Metaphors are used either to make an idea clearer or give the reader an analogy that touches the senses or emotions better than a plain description of the object or process. Metaphors, then, are an important part of an author's creative style. If you cannot come up with your own metaphor to illustrate an important idea, then use the metaphor in the Source Article, but give the author credit for it.

 

 

Source Article:	Metaphor PLAGIARISM
This picture of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, in visible light looks rather dull. Yet at an infrared wavelength of 60m the region looks very different. In infrared light we can see a glittering jewel-box of new born stars peeking out of the dust clouds that lie between us and the center of our Galaxy.	Although dusty clouds block our vision of stellar nurseries, infrared light reveals them. These newborns glitter like a jewel box and seem to be peeking at us from behind the dust obscuring them.
	How to use the info without plagiarizing
	Although dusty clouds block our vision of stellar nurseries, infrared light reveals them. In "Source Article," So-n-so describes these newborns as glittery jewel boxes peeking out at us from deep inside the dust clouds where they still remain.

 

Another example:

 

Source Article:	Metaphor PLAGIARISM
The black holes seem to inhabit every galaxy that has a central bulge--the vast, elliptical swarm of very old stars which constitutes many galaxies' most prominent part.	The bulge is a large swarm of extremely old stars.
	How to use the info without plagiarizing
	The bulge of a galaxy is elliptical and contains old stars that fly around the center like bees in a hive.

 

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Type V: Idea Plagiarism

 

Description: If the author of the source article expresses a creative idea or suggests a solution to a problem, the idea or solution must be clearly attributed to the author. Many students have difficulty distinguishing an author's ideas and/or solutions from public domain information. Public domain information is any idea or solution about which people in the field accept as general knowledge. For example, what a black hole is and how it is defined is general knowledge. You do not need to reference a general description of a black hole. The escape velocity of earth is also general knowledge and needs no reference. The approximate distance to the center of the Galaxy is also general knowledge. However, a new idea about how to look for black holes or a new solution to a physics problem needs to be attributed to the authors. If you don't know what is accepted as public domain in a particular field, ASK.

 

 

 

Source Article:

Idea PLAGIARISM

Until now, infrared carbon stars have been classified as such due either to the presence of carbon-rich dust or to these stars' presence in region VII of the Habing diagram. Our visible spectra show conclusively that these stars are true carbon stars and do not have any O-rich molecules in their atmospheres. Their weak Ba lines might indicate an under-abundance of s-process elements. This important result, if true, would certainly separate infrared carbon stars from the optical population.

Infrared carbon stars show weak Ba lines and this might mean that they do not have the normal amount of s-process elements in their atmospheres, making them decidedly a different type of star.     How to use the info without plagiarizing The difference between optical and infrared carbon stars might soon be resolved since So-n-so (Source Article) announced that the weakness of Ba lines might indicate that the infrared group originates from a different population than optical carbon stars.

 

 

Another Example:

 

Source Article:	How to use the info without plagiarizing
Hot stars at 30,000 degrees emit a lot more blue light than red light, and so hot stars look blue or bluish-white. Cool stars at 3,000 degrees give off more red light than blue, and so these stars look red.	Stars considered to be hot are 30,000 degrees, whereas stars as cool as 3,000 degrees are considered to be cold.

 

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Sample Assignment:

 

After reading the article below, write a paper (3 to 5 pages, maximum) explaining the topic of the article as you would to a friend in college who knows nothing about astronomy.

 

1)  explain the general topic clearly, in your own style and in your own words.

2)  discuss some specific information contained in the article

 

Example:

Source Article: "Probing the Milky Way's Black Heart," Science, 1998, vol 282, p 211

Background information about black holes from Pasachoff, chapter on black holes

 

 

Source Article:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Title: Probing the Milky Way's Black Heart.

Source: Science, 10/09/98, Vol. 282 Issue 5387, p211, 2p, 2c

Author(s): Schilling, Govert

Section: NEWS OF THE WEEK

 

ASTRONOMY

 

PROBING THE MILKY WAY'S BLACK HEART

By Govert Schilling

 

Astronomers have taken their closest look at the mysterious center of our

galaxy--and uncovered a further mystery. At the very center of the galaxy

lies a black hole with a mass millions of times greater than the sun's. The

black hole is invisible, but just outside it, electrons torn from matter

falling into the black hole gyrate around magnetic field lines, broadcasting

radio waves. By mapping the radio emission with the Very Long Baseline

Array, a system of linked telescopes that spans North America, a group of

Taiwanese and American astronomers have found that the emitting region is

drastically elongated, suggesting that the black hole is somehow shooting

jets of material out of the plane of the galaxy.

 

"It's an interesting result," Cambridge University astronomer Martin Rees

says of the map, which offers the most intimate view ever of the immediate

surroundings of a giant black hole. Rees, who in 1982 was the first to

suggest that the radio emission from the galactic center comes from hot gas

circulating near a supermassive black hole, adds that "the jetlike shape

inferred in the new observations suggests that the emission may come mainly

from an outflow"--a conclusion that runs counter to many models of the radio

source's structure.

 

From the tremendous speeds of the stars whirling around the Milky Way's

central radio source, called Sagittarius A(*), astronomers had calculated

that it must harbor a black hole with a mass equivalent to 2.6 million suns.

The region is invisible to optical telescopes because of intervening dust

clouds, says team leader Kwok-Yung Lo of the Academia Sinica Institute of

Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei, so the most detailed view of it comes

from synchrotron radiation, the radio waves emitted by fast-moving electrons

spiraling in a strong magnetic field. "The intrinsic size and structure of

[the radio source] are crucial for our understanding of the immediate

vicinity of the massive black hole," he says.

 

Earlier attempts to gauge the size and shape of the radio source were

unsuccessful because of scattering by interstellar electrons, which made the

radio source look larger than it really is, just as a streetlight looks

larger when viewed in the mist. However, these blurring effects vary with

wavelength. By combining near-simultaneous measurements at five different

radio wavelengths, Lo and his colleagues--Zhi-Qiang Shen from Taiwan and

Jun-Hui Zhao and Paul Ho of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

in Cambridge, Massachusetts--were able to extract the true size and

structure of the source from the scattering. The team presented the results

last month at a workshop on the galactic center in Tucson, Arizona, and will

publish them in the November Astrophysical Journal Letters.

 

In the plane of the galaxy, they found, the radio source measures 150

million kilometers across--about the distance from Earth to the sun and

about 10 times the calculated diameter of the black hole itself. In the

perpendicular direction, the source stretches nearly four times that

distance. Those proportions imply that the black hole is somehow spurting

out material, probably in two opposite directions. But Lo says that the

observations don't support a number of scenarios that astronomers have

invoked to explain radio emission from Sagittarius A(*).

 

For instance, the so-called coupled disk-jet model, which holds that the

radio emission is from jets of material expelled from a disk of material

that is spiraling into the black hole, predicts a smaller jet for the Milky

Way's black hole than Lo and his colleagues have measured. In another

popular model, the synchrotron radiation is from extremely hot electrons in

the inner parts of an accretion disk, but because the electrons would occupy

a near-spherical region, the model is hard to reconcile with the observed

elongated shape, says Lo.

 

Rees cautions that there is a slight chance that the elongated shape is not

genuine. It might instead be due to scattering in a preferred direction, as

a result of asymmetric turbulence in the gas surrounding the black hole. But

with the galactic-center black hole only 26,000 light-years away, Lo and

other radio astronomers have a good chance of ultimately sorting out its

puzzles.

 

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Sample Paper without plagiarism:

 

A BLACK HOLE IN THE MILKY WAY?

C. Barnbaum

 

A huge black hole has been discovered in the center of our own Galaxy! Surely this is the stuff of science fiction, but apparently this is a case of nature being stranger than fiction. To feel the full impact of this discovery, we need to understand what a black hole is. To that end, we must consider how gravity works.

The reason we stick to the ground is our mutual gravitational attraction to our planet. If you try to leave earth say, by jumping, you won't get very far. Experience dictates that the more energy you put into your jump, the faster you jump and the higher up you go. But what if we wanted to leave earth altogether? How fast would we have to go? This speed, known as escape speed, depends only on the mass of what you are standing on (earth in this case) and on its size. To leave earth completely, you would have to achieve a speed of 11.3 km/s. Because escape speed depends on both mass and size, the more compact the body you are standing on, the faster you'll have to go to escape it. If you were to squish the mass of the earth into a smaller ball, you would have to go faster than 11.3 km/s to escape.

What would happen if you continued to squish and squeeze earth into a smaller and smaller sphere? The escape speed would become larger and larger. This is the line of questioning that drove John Mitchell in the 19th century to consider how small a sun-like mass would need to be compacted so that the escape speed became as fast as the speed of light. At the time, it was considered an interesting math problem, but not physically possible. The notion of a body so compact that not even light could escape from its surface left the realm of theoretical speculation and science fiction when Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity. Not only was Einstein's theory of gravity consistent with the existence of such bizarre objects, but it explained how it could happen. This type of ultra-compact object became known as a "black hole" -- "black" because not even light could escape, and "hole" because once anything goes past the point of light escape speed, for all intents and purposes, it has left the known universe. And as it turns out, very massive stars end their lives this way, by turning into the most compact and weird objects in the universe.

The nature of a black hole is surely stranger than John Mitchell had ever suspected. Physicists have since learned that if matter is squeezed and compacted enough to require greater than light speed for escape, then the matter itself can't hold up under the strain and collapses into what is called a "singularity." In other words, although the amount of mass is unchanged, the radius, or size, shrinks to zero. Any number divided by zero (such as mass divided by size) is infinity -- a singularity. Modern physics and mathematics do not know what to do with infinities when they crop up, and so what goes on inside a black hole is entirely unknown. Inside a black hole, one plus one no longer equals two, but what it does equal, scientists have no idea. The location around a black hole where the escape speed becomes equal to the speed of light is a convenient sort of boundary to use in defining a black hole. This boundary is called the event horizon, and anything inside the event horizon can no longer communicate with or affect the rest of the universe.

 

There has been much observational evidence for the existence of black holes being formed from the dying embers of burnt out, massive stars, that is, stars at least eight times the mass of our own sun. The article, "Probing the Milky Way's Black Heart," however, discusses the evidence for a huge black hole, 3 million times the mass of our sun, lurking in the center of our Galaxy. Scientist Martin Rees suggested in 1982 that at really massive black hole might have formed in the center of our Galaxy. Other scientists have since attempted to make measurements of the velocities of stars whirling around the center of the Galaxy. Since the orbital speed of objects depends on the mass they are orbiting and on how far they are from the central mass, the velocity measurements of stars close to the center can allow scientists to calculate the mass and size of the putative black hole. Early measurements weren't very accurate, however. Recently, though, another group of scientists have used a new technique to study radio light coming from the center where vast jets of material are thought to be spat out by the violence going on near the black hole's event horizon as stars orbit closer and closer to it. This is called the "disk-jet" model, and is only one of at least two models that try to explain the physics of what is happening in the mysterious center of our Galaxy. Martin Rees admits that "It is an interesting result," but suggests there might be a better model since the jet shape might be caused by a different kind of explosive event. But whatever the physical model for the interaction of matter and the huge black hole in the galactic center, that the beast is there is certain. The details of how it formed in the first place and how it affects the gas and stars near it will feed astronomer's dreams for years to come.