Citation Etiquette

Plagiarism is understood as the complete or partial imitation of the work of another author without citing that work’s source and author. Short passages from another work may be quoted. The quote must, however, be identified and its source cited.

  1. Source citation: Cite all of your sources fully and verifiably, such that anyone can check them.
  2. Your own work: Differentiate clearly between your own work and that of others: always name the author(s) of work which is not your own. This applies to texts, computer codes, tables, graphics and data, even if they come from the World Wide Web.
  3. Word-for-word quotes: Place borrowed text (both sentences and concepts) in inverted commas.
  4. Analogous quotes (paraphrases): If you have rendered text in your own words or summarised it, give its source in parentheses.
  5. Secondary sources: Identify a citation as a secondary source if you have taken it from another author without looking at the original source yourself.
  6. Bibliography: At the end of your paper list all of the sources and ‘intellectual mentors’ you have used.
  7. General knowledge: Anything which may be regarded as general or basic knowledge does not require a source citation. If the basic ideas are taken from another author, e.g. from a textbook, however, the source must be cited.

 You may not:

  • use the exact words of or ideas from another author’s intellectual property (text, ideas, structure, etc.) without citing the source clearly.
  • use text from the internet without citing the www. address and the date you accessed it.
  • re-use your own written texts or parts of them in different course papers or performance assessments without explicitly identifying them as such.
  • translate and use a foreign-language text without citing its source.
  • submit work under your own name which has been written for you by someone else (a ‘ghost writer’).
  • use an extract from another author’s work, paraphrase it and indeed cite the source but somewhere other than in the context of that extract (for example, the (in practice, plagiarised) source is hidden in a footnote at the end of a paper).

(Adapted from the ‘Notice on dealing with plagiarism’ issued on 30 April 2007 by the Teaching Committee of the University of Zurich)