Troubleshooting
Avoiding Plagiarism Checklist
- Is each use of someone else’s material noted in your assignment?
- Did you reference your sources for graphs, statistics and other borrowed data?
- Are quotations from another persons’ work exact. Did you use quotation marks?
- If you paraphrased or summarized someone else’s material did you use your own words and sentence structure?
- Does your works cited include all the sources you referred to in your assignment?
Missing Information
- In some cases not all of the recommended publication elements are immediately evident on the work being cited. If you have tried and been unable to locate the element do not include the information instead include as much information as is available so that your reader can still track down your source if necessary.
DOI's and URL's
- A DOI is a unique and permanent ID that provides persistent and reliable access to a digital object such as an online article. If a DOI is available for an online source it should be used in your citation, but not every online source is going to have one. For online sources with no DOI specified, use the most direct, complete and stable URL you can find for your citations.
- If both a DOI and stable URL are available for an online source, the DOI is preferred and is noted at the end of the citation. If both a DOI and stable URL are unavailable, include the name of the database or site in your citation.
Sources with No Citation Examples
- If you cannot find an example of the type of material you want to cite, and if you have exhausted other resources, then include all of the details in your citation that would help a reader find the source easily. To help with formatting, consult an existing citation example (e.g., books or web pages) and modify the template/form to accommodate your source.