Academic Integrity

Original Editor - Rachael Lowe

Top Contributors - Mariam Hashem, Kim Jackson, Admin, Tarina van der Stockt, Amanda Ager and Shwe Shwe U Marma  

What is Academic Integrity

Academic integrity is a code of ethics that should be followed in academic writing and when creating / editing a Physiopedia page. In other words avoid cheating, misinterpreting, manipulating and or taking the credit for others' work.

The Physiopedia community of editors are part of an academic community which shares knowledge. As part of this, editors need to know how to interpret and present other people's ideas and combine them to produce evidence based summaries of topics on Physiopedia. This is academic integrity.

When attempting to write on Physiopedia or other platforms, your outputs should be based on understanding and interpreting the knowledge then you have to use your own words and style to represent the information.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as presenting someone else’s work (e.g. text or images), in whole or in part or with only a small amount of paraphrasing, as your own. It comes in many forms: direct by copying and pasting without paraphrasing, copying several authors' works and putting them together without proper referencing, inadequately citing the work and/or misinterpreting information.

Plagiarism.org suggest that all of the following are considered plagiarism:

• Turning in someone else's work as your own;
• Copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit;
• Failing to put a quotation in quotation marks;
• Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation;
• Changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit;
• Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not (see our section on "fair use" rules).

Simply acknowledging that certain material has been borrowed and providing your audience with the information necessary to find that source is usually enough to prevent plagiarism. See the referencing article for more information on how to cite sources properly.

How to Avoid Plagiarism

This Academic integrity tutorial introduces key academic skills to help you develop as an independent learner and critical thinker.

• First, you should learn about the basics of academic writing skills to be able to express your own style in writing.
• Avoid ''copy and paste'' from paper. Instead learn how to paraphrase the information from the source and represent it with your words.
• Referencing is mandatory, don't assume that something is commonly known and there is no need to cite it. Citing the author tells the reader that the content was from another source
• Learn to spot plagiarism. Double check your writing to see if there is a phrase similar to the source then decide if you would like to paraphrase it or include it as a quote.
• When paraphrasing you should use your own words
• Make sure you understand the text fully before paraphrasing it to avoid misinterpreting and manipulating others' works.
• Use quotation marks to indicate when you are using the words of the author, or when more than 6 consecutive words are copied from the article. "Very efficient way to avoid plagiarism".
• Ask for permission from the author when you need to reproduce a figure, an image or a graph, or any information provided that has copyright
• When dealing with information cited from a second source, go back to the original source to make it is not misinterpreted.

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This checklist is a simple and helpful way to avoid plagiarism.

There may be times, when trying to convey something you have read, is difficult to put into your own words - especially! when the author has said it so well. The key is to understand what you have read! If you are still unsure about how to recognise and avoid plagiarism there are many online sources to guide you in the right direction. You can follow this tutorial which also includes tests ensuring you can produce great writing that avoids plagiarism.

Resources

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