What plagiarism is and how we can avoid it.

Plagiarism- According to the definition given in the 1997 New Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, plagiarism is "the unauthorized use of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own" (508).

To avoid plagiarism, we must give credit whenever we use:-

• another person’s idea, opinion, or theory;
• any facts, statistics, graphs, drawings—any pieces of information—that are not common knowledge;
• quotations of another person’s actual spoken or written words; or
• paraphrase of another person’s spoken or written words.  

Of the three ways to document sources - Footnotes, Endnotes, and Parenthetical References, the simplest is using Parenthetical References, sometimes referred to as Parenthetical Documentation or Parenthetical Citations.  ( http://www.aresearchguide.com/6plagiar.html )

-- A footnote is a note of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document. The note can provide an author's comments on the main text or citations of a reference work in support of the text, or both. ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footnotes

-- Endnote - An annotation placed at the end of a document

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/endnote

-- Different methods of Citation-

• APA: psychology, education, nursing and other social sciences
• MLA: literature, arts and humanities
• Chicago: history, and all subjects
• Turabian: designed for all college students to use with all subjects
• Other citation styles: law, science (CBE/CSE), engineering and more

(http://www.csulb.edu/library/eref/vref/style.html#apa )

How to Cite documents using APA Citation:-

Use parenthetical citation. Cite your resources directly after their use when working in APA citation. In some cases, this may be at the end of a block quote, while in others this may be at the end of a paraphrased section of text. Either way, the information that goes into the parenthetical citation remains the same. It is the author’s name, followed by a comma, and the page number where the reference was found, written as "(Bukowski, p. 99)."

Create a reference page. Title the page that lists your references as “References,”

This title should appear at the top center of the page, which is also the last page of your paper. Your references should be listed alphabetically by the first word of each citation, which will usually be the author’s name, or the title of the work if there is no author’s name.

If you don’t know the precise page range, it can be written as: "pp. 19+.".

 ( http://www.ehow.com/how_2305212_use-apa-citation-research-writing.html)