Academic Integrity Fundamentals Tutorial

When you use the words, ideas, or images of another, you must cite your source. Your source may be:

• a passage of text
• an audio or visual object (graphs, charts, figures, and images)
• computer code
• data set
• someone's original idea

Your source may be a book, journal article, the Internet, or even a conversation or email message.

You don't need to cite information that is considered "common knowledge." Common knowledge includes facts that are known by a lot of people and can be found in many sources. For example, you do not need to cite:

• Canada's Confederation was in 1867.
• Edmonton is the capital of Alberta.
• Water freezes at 0° Celsius.

However, you do need to cite: 

• Anything you learned in class. 
• Anything you read online.
• Anything your instructor might know, but your friends or family wouldn’t already know.

If you are not sure, cite the source! Citation adds credibility to your writing and highlights the accuracy of your information.

About this Error

Using graphs, charts, figures or images from a source without acknowledging that another person developed them is considered plagiarism.

Example

Student Paper - Incorrect Draft
A cup of coffee includes over 1000 chemical compounds, including caffeine, chlorogenic acid, trigonelline, and kahweol and cafestol. The figure below shows the concentration and total amount of these chemical compounds in traditional coffee and expresso.

Is this plagiarism?

Yes, this is plagiarism!

In this example, the student has taken a figure from another source and used it directly in their draft. By doing this, the student has used another person's ideas, calculations and words without acknowledgement. This is plagiarism.

Correcting the Error

To eliminate this type of plagiarism, you must provide citation for any tables, graphics, figures or images you acquire from secondary sources. Remember, even if you use only information from a graph, chart, figure or image in your paper, you still need to acknowledge your source by providing proper citation.

Student Paper - Corrected Draft
A cup of coffee includes over 1000 chemical compounds, including caffeine, chlorogenic acid, trigonelline, and kahweol and cafestol (Surma & Oparil, 2021). Figure 1 shows the concentration and total amount of these chemical compounds in traditional coffee and espresso.

Figure 1
Concentration and Total Amounts of Chemical Compounds in Traditional Coffee and Espresso

Note. From "Coffee and Arterial Hypertension,” by S. Surma and S. Oparil, 2021, Current Hypertension Reports, 23(7), p. 38 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11906-021-01156-3). Used here under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

adapted from NIU (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)