Guide to Library Research in Science

Preamble

The academic program at The College of Wooster seeks to promote the intellectual development of each student and the realization of that individual’s potential for creative thinking, learning, and understanding. In achieving this goal, each student must learn to use his/her mind rigorously, imaginatively, and independently.

An atmosphere in which each student does his/her own work, except under circumstances in which the instructor indicates that additional aid is legitimate and profitable, is necessary for genuine academic mastery. This implies that it is each student’s responsibility neither to seek nor to use aid, but to utilize his/her own mind, talent, and inner resources to the fullest extent possible. It also places on each student an obligation not to offer or make available unauthorized sources of aid to other students, knowing that such aid is detrimental to those students and to the College community. Finally, each student must be responsible for the maintenance of an atmosphere of academic integrity by confronting violators or reporting any actions that violate its principles, since such violations ultimately harm all members of the community. These principles merely carry out the general purpose of the College to be a community in which the members find it right and necessary to promote the fullest learning by everyone. In other words, a violation of the Code of Academic Integrity conflicts with the values, work and purpose of the entire College community and is not merely a private matter between an individual faculty member and a student.

The Scot’s Key

Here at the beginning of the semester I want to say something to you about academic integrity.

I’m deeply convinced that integrity is an essential part of any true educational experience, integrity on my part as a faculty member and integrity on your part as a student.

To take an easy example, would you want to be operated on by a doctor who cheated his way through medical school? Or would you feel comfortable on a bridge designed by an engineer who cheated her way through engineering school? Would you trust your tax return to an accountant who copied his exam papers from his neighbor?

Those are easy examples, but what difference does it make if you as a student or I as a faculty member violate the principles of academic integrity in a political science course, especially if it is not your major?

For me, the answer is that integrity is important in this course precisely because integrity is important in all areas of life. If we don’t have integrity in the small things, if we find it possible to justify plagiarism or cheating or shoddy work in things that don’t seem important, how will we resist doing the same in areas that really matter, in areas where money might be at stake, or the possibility of advancement, or our esteem in the eyes of others?

Personal integrity is not a quality we are born to naturally. It’s a quality of character we need to nurture, and this requires practice in both meanings of that word (as in practice the piano and practice in a profession). We can only be a person of integrity if we practice it everyday.

What does that involve for each of us in this course? Let’s find out by going through each stage in the course. As you’ll see, academic integrity basically requires the same things of you as a student as it requires of me as a teacher.

Bill Taylor
http://www.academicintegrity.org/pdf/Letter_To_My_Students.pdf

Appendix II. Plagiarism

To use or imitate the language, ideas, or thoughts of another person and represent them as one’s own is to commit an act of plagiarism. This is true whether the material used is only a brief excerpt or an entire paper or article and whether:

• the material used is only a brief excerpt or an entire paper or article;
• the original source is the work of another student or in a publication, including publications available electronically, either on the Internet or from such electronic media as CD-ROM;
• the product is a written paper, oral presentation, or an electronic publication such as a Web page.

It is not the use of others’ ideas that is unethical; writers expect and hope their work will be read and used. But to use this without acknowledgment is literary kidnapping. (In fact, the word "plagiarism’’ derives from the Latin word for kidnapper.) Merely to paraphrase (as opposed to quoting verbatim and at length) does not relieve one of the obligation to make clear the source of the ideas or to indicate specifically direct quotations.

To have mastered material about which you write implies having read and digested it, so that it comes easily in your own words and you could talk with others about it intelligently. Your obligations -- out of respect both to the writers you have read and to good craftsmanship -- are to make the ideas you have absorbed a part of you and to acknowledge the sources you have used.

More detailed information about the proper use of others’ work and appropriate methods of acknowledging borrowed material may be found in most handbooks on composition and will be discussed in various classes in which writing plays a part. Additionally, the proliferation of electronic sources of information has created heightened awareness of the ease with which unauthorized material can be obtained and used. The obligation to document material that has been taken from electronic sources is absolutely the same as the oblication to document any sources.

The Scot’s Key