Avoiding Plagiarism Features of the APA Style

Features of the APA Style: Avoiding Plagiarism In academia, it is often said that professors and graduate students must publish or perish—in other words, writing published academic articles are very important for building an academic reputation. This means that being associated with new, important, and innovative ideas is vitally important to enhance one’s academic reputation. Out of respect for this fact, and to show professional honesty and integrity, it is important to give credit to people who have developed such new ideas.

To steal ideas from an academic is to steal that academic’s livelihood. Even stealing from a graduate student or a layperson, is wrong, however, given the importance of ideas in establishing a professional reputation and credibility. The APA style is useful, because it notes in the body of an essay, the name of the individual who authored the book, article, or other work who was the original author of the idea or quote that is being cited.

If merely an idea is being noted, a last name and a title is acceptable. But if actual words are being quoted of the author, they should be surrounded by quotation marks and the specific page number of the text from which the quote is derived. According to Spicer (2017), if a writer uses more than three consecutive words from the original text, those words should be enclosed in quotation marks. This is not only useful from the author’s perspective.

It is also useful from the reader’s perspective. If the reader wishes to identify the different authors who made intellectual contributions to the piece of writing they are reading, possibly for their own academic research, proper APA style makes it easy to do so, as they can simply consult the author’s bibliography at the end. The fact that APA style uses dates as well as names makes it even easier to identify which particular authors made a contribution to the work.

Using the date also gives the reader a sense of how current the ideas are, which is especially helpful in the social and natural sciences. The APA style was originally developed by the American Psychological Association, and thus reflects many of the issues particular to the discipline. For example, in the sciences, authors tend to write journal articles rather than books, given the need to make a contribution of the most current information possible. Consistency of formatting makes the author’s research easier to read and to trace references.

As a graduate student, adhering to APA format is critical. First, it is necessary to identify all sources for information other than commonsense wisdom by the author’s name and date of the publication in which the idea was located. Paraphrases, or restating of the author’s specific ideas in one’s own words, should similarly be credited. Quotes should always be in quotation marks, and attached to a specific page number.

Knowing the difference between a paraphrase and quote is thus the first step in avoiding plagiarism. Keeping track of reference notes is also important, to avoid unintentional plagiarism. Not all plagiarism is malicious. When embarked upon a very extensive research paper in particular, it is very easy to forget the source of information, even to attribute it to one’s self. This is especially true of accessing information online, including scholarly journals online.

When cutting and pasting, it is vital to immediately put the quote in quotation marks and to cite it correctly, so as not to forget and commit.