Apa Style Guide for Academic Essays, Research Papers and Reports

APA Style Guide for Academic Essays, Research Papers and Reports

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is the copying of wording used by other writers or speakers. You also commit plagiarism if you fail to acknowledge that you have made use of the ideas of others in your own writing. You acknowledge your sources by providing references to authors in the body of your essay (i.e. an in-text citation) and in a reference section at the end of an essay or assignment.

Plagiarism can be avoided in the following ways:

Summarize information and express it in your own words to give your readers a picture of

the writer’s ideas

Paraphrase information in your own words to give your readers a more detailed picture of

the writer’s ideas

Use direct (word-for-word) quotations from source material (but don't use too many quotes)

Looking at in-text citations and references

At the end of your assignment, you should include a list of all the books/articles that you cited in your essay or report. Since your research paper, essay or report builds on the previous knowledge from others’ ideas, you need to acknowledge that those ideas are from another person. To do so, you must use citations and references which clearly show from whom an idea is borrowed and the year the author wrote it.

In-text citations (APA style)

Although the list of references is usually one of the last things that you write, you have to start recording the appropriate bibliographic information as soon as you start finding your source material. There are two reasons for this:

1. You need the information for the in-text citations and list of references.

1. You need to know where the entire information came from so that you can check it for accuracy during the final stage of the writing process.

You must give citations for opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations that you have come across in your research even if you had the same idea yourself.

Some ideas do not need to be cited. These include:

•  Any commonly known fact (e.g. China regained sovereignty over Hong Kong on 1 July 1997)
•  Your own original idea (e.g. your thesis)
•  Any standard equation or theory (e.g., procedure for calculating interest, etc.)

You should always provide references in the following cases:

...