Intellectual honesty is a cornerstone of University life.

The information below will help you understand why and how to acknowledge your intellectual debts to the work of others. It offers advice for thinking about how you use electronic resources in your research, defines key terms like ‘plagiarism’, and provides important examples of what to do (and what not to do!) when you set about doing your academic work.

You will want to return to this page throughout your degree programme in order to refresh your memory about what it means to be part of an intellectual community.

 

Top Tips for Avoiding Plagiarism (click here)

Intellectual Community in Classical and Archaeological Studies

Classical and Archaeological Studies at Kent is, above all else, an intellectual community. Like all universities, Kent is a place where students and staff come together to pursue their love of learning together. Some of the work we do is part of our individual quest to grow as thinkers, scholars, and researchers, but must of what we do is a collective effort aimed at advancing and refining the field of human knowledge.

We all benefit from the free exchange of ideas and interpretations of evidence. We test our thoughts, theories, and ideas informally over coffee with friends or in seminars, and more formally in papers, coursework or exams. In all of our interactions with friends, classmates, advisers and teachers, we grow and profit by analysing and evaluating each other’s ideas.

All of these interactions – formal and informal – are built on the central tenet of TRUST.

This plays out in three key ways.

• First, you should be able to trust that your ideas – no matter how new, untested or unique – will be taken seriously, evaluated respectfully and without ridicule. You should be able to voice these ideas without fearing that someone else will take credit for them.
• Second, those around you should similarly be able to trust that when you say something is your idea, you are telling the truth. In the same way that we respect people’s ownership of their phone or laptop, we also have to respect people’s intellectual ownership of their ideas.
• Third, the intellectual community that you are a part of in CLAS transcends time and space. Your intellectual community now includes everyone who has ever endeavoured to expand human understanding. So we will find theories in books, reports, journals, poetry, or websites and the authors of these works, too, form part of our intellectual community and so we must respect their ownership of these ideas too.

Human knowledge progresses when we build upon each other’s work, and this only works when we all – from first-year students to seasoned professors – engage in intellectual honesty by crediting the work of others.

How Do I Write Original Work?

During your time in CLAS, you’ll be exposed to an enormous range of new ideas and theories. Students are often daunted at the range of interpretations and analyses that they begin to encounter as they develop their understanding of the ancient world. It takes practice to figure out how your own thoughts about a subject relate to those of the scholars that you read. Your ideas should be shaped by the sources you read and the scholars you encounter in lectures or in your reading. The most important thing you can do is take good notes! 

What makes University different from School is that at Kent we are challenging you to go beyond what you read in your textbooks or hear in your lectures. We are asking you to understand, evaluate, critique and synthesise the information and concepts that you encounter to make something that is uniquely your own. There is enormous satisfaction and excitement when you hit on an original idea as you delve into your reading assignments and coursework. Doing original work is the most demanding and most rewarding activity you will undertake at University. Because this exploration occurs within the context of the modules you take, this work is also the basis of the assessment that determines your performance in your modules. This is why intellectual honesty is so important to academic life.

You must always clearly distinguish between the ideas that are your own and those that you got from someone else. Sometimes the ‘someone else’ will be an author of a journal article or book chapter assigned for your module, sometimes it will be a lecturer, an author of a website, a classmate or a friend. It isn’t always easy to make distinctions about where an idea first cropped up, so it is very, very important that you take very good notes when you study and give yourself time before you submit your assignments to check you have accurately credited people for their ideas. A lot of the mistakes students make in this regard arise when they run out of time or have taken poor notes.

Identify your own ideas first. Sit down first with your primary source material. Make sure you pay attention to your own thoughts as you read and study. If you think ‘that is weird’ or ‘why did she say that?’ or ‘what is that doing there?’ then you may want to put a tick in the margin, circle a word or object etc. to signal that you need to come back to that section and think about it again. During this second examination, jot down the questions or ideas you have about that passage. Mark them explicitly in your notes as your own ideas.

Take clear notes when you read modern scholarship. Do the same thing, but make sure that when you enter ideas from these authors into your notes that you mark them explicitly as belonging to someone else (and while you’re at it put the page number and an abbreviated title along with it). If you pay attention to your own thought as you read this material, you will begin to move towards an independent and original understanding as you develop your ability to bring your own questions about what you read into conversation with others.

Why Should I Acknowledge My Sources?

• To distinguish your own ideas from those of others.
• To demonstrate that you have done research on your topic, and thus have met the necessary assessment criteria for your module.
• To establish your credibility and the authority of your knowledge and ideas.
• To demonstrate that you are participating in the contemporary debate about your topic.
• To give your reader an opportunity to follow up on topics you raise in greater detail.
• To allow your reader to check the sources you have consulted.
• To provide an honest representation of your work so that your reader can evaluate your work fairly on its merits.
• To all the reader to understand and appreciate the unique contribution you’re making to the subject of your study.

All of these reasons for acknowledging your sources are built on the essential element of intellectual honesty and how you demonstrate that to your reader. But appropriate acknowledgement of your sources is also about being intellectually honest with yourself. If you draft an entire essay, diligently footnoted throughout, you may discover that you cannot find an original idea or sentence of your own and that means your reader won’t be able to find one either. This means that you have more work to do in order to develop a substantial original idea. By contrast, if you write a sophisticated paper with complex and well-informed ideas but without adequate acknowledgement of the work of others, your reader may be suspicious of your work.

In general, we want to focus on the positive reasons for engaging in intellectual honesty, but it is also important for you to understand the consequences of failing to do so. It is a serious breach of academic integrity if you do not properly acknowledge the sources—textual, personal, electronic—upon which your own work has been built and can lead to the accusation of plagiarism.

The University of Kent gives this definition of plagiarism in the General Regulations Appendix A:

reproducing in any work submitted for assessment or review (for example, examination answers, essays, project reports, dissertations or theses) any material derived from work authored by another without clearly acknowledging the source.

Plagiarism is a very serious charge and it can result in disciplinary probation, suspension, or expulsion. The disciplinary process is explained below.

The most important thing to know is this:

if you fail to cite your sources, whether deliberately or inadvertently, you will still be found responsible for the act of plagiarism.

Ignorance of academic regulations or the excuse of sloppy or rushed work does not constitute an acceptable defenCe against the charge of plagiarism. You are expected to have read and understood the academic regulations as described in this CLAS Handbook and in the Student Charter and Regulations.

When Do I Cite or Acknowledge My Sources?

Best rule of thumb: When in doubt, CITE YOUR SOURCES! 

In addition to this rule of thumb, there are five key moments when acknowledging your source is important. The process of acknowledging these sources is called ‘citation’.

If you aim for completeness when you write, you’ll never find yourself in trouble if you cite a source when it’s not absolutely necessary. If you are even unsure about whether or not to acknowledge a source, ask your lecturer or seminar leader before submitting your assignment.

In particular, observe the following:

1. Quotation. Whenever you quote a source verbatim (i.e. use their exact words) no matter how large or small the quotation is (eve if it is just a single word) you must use quotation marks, or if longer than three lines, formatted in what is called ‘block text'(i.e. clearly indented beyond the regular margin – there is a special ‘style’ for this in Microsoft Word that you can select and it will automatically ‘block’ your quotation). Either in the text, or in a footnote, you should provide precise information about the source, including the author’s name, title of the work, place and date of publication (where relevant), and page number(s) from which the quotation is taken. Even if you use only a short phrase, or even one key word, you must use quotation marks in order to set off the borrowed language from your own, and you must cite the source.
2. Paraphrase. Paraphrase is a restatement of another person’s thoughts or ideas in your own words, using your own sentence structure, but is generally the same length as the original. In this case you don’t need to use quotation marks, but you do need to make clear that these ideas belong to the author, either by writing a footnote or putting a note in parentheses. You should use quotation if another author’s idea is particularly well put, but use paraphrase if you can restate the idea more clearly or simply, or if you want to place the idea in the flow of your own thoughts—though be sure to announce your source in your own text (“Plato argued that…”) and always include a citation.
3. Summary. Summary is a concise statement of another person’s thoughts or ideas in your own words and is usually shorter than the original. When summarising other people’s ideas, arguments, or conclusions, you must cite your sources—for example, with a footnote at the end of each summary. Taking good notes while doing your research will help you keep straight which ideas belong to which author. Good note-taking habits are especially important when you’re reviewing a series of interpretations or ideas on your subject.
   
4. Facts, Information, and Data. Often you’ll want to use facts or information to support your own argument. If the information is found exclusively in a particular source, you must clearly acknowledge that source. For example, if you use data from a site report, you must cite your source appropriately. Or if you use a piece of information discovered by another scholar in the course of their own research, you must cite your source. But if the fact or information is generally known and accepted—for example, that Plato was the founder of the Academy or that Alexander the Great died in 323 BCE — you do not need to cite a source. Note that facts are different from ideas: facts may not need to be cited, whereas ideas must always be cited. Deciding which facts or pieces of information require citation and which are common knowledge, and thus do not require citation, isn’t always easy. For example, finding the same fact or piece of information in multiple sources doesn’t necessarily mean that it counts as common knowledge. Your best course of action in such a case may be to cite the most credible or authoritative of the multiple sources. The belief that an idea or fact may be “common knowledge” does not absolve you from citing your source. It’s certainly not a defence against the charge of plagiarism, although many students offer that excuse during the disciplinary process. Keeping in mind that your professor is the primary audience for your work, you should ask your professor for guidance if you’re uncertain. If you don’t have that opportunity, fall back on the fundamental rule: when in doubt, cite.
5. Supplementary Information. Occasionally, especially in a longer research paper like a dissertation, you may not be able to include all of the information or ideas from your research in the body of your own paper. In such cases, insert a note offering supplementary information rather than simply providing basic bibliographic information (author, title, place and date of publication, and page numbers). Such footnotes are common in academic journals and book chapters. In such footnotes or endnotes, you might provide additional data to bolster your argument, or briefly present an alternative idea that you found in one of your sources, or even list two or three additional articles on some topic that your reader might find of interest. Such notes demonstrate the breadth and depth of your research, and permit you to include germane, but not essential, information or concepts without interrupting the flow of your own paper. This is why footnotes count in the word count of an essay. Additional claims or analysis of your own that you want to include in your essay without distracting readers from the central line of argument may also appear in footnote form. In these cases, the footnote will not include a citation because the ideas or findings presented belong to you.

In the five instances listed above, academic integrity requires both citing the source in the text of your essay and its incorporation into your bibliography.

To be clear, it is not enough to simply list a source in your bibliography if it deserves explicit citation in the essay’s body. Failure to provide citation in the essay may result in being charged with plagiarism.

Sometimes, though rarely, a source merits inclusion in your bibliography even when it doesn’t merit a particular citation in your paper’s text. This most often occurs when a source plays a critical role in your understanding of your topic, but never lends a specific idea or piece of evidence to your essay’s argument. For example, imagine you’re writing a paper about totalitarian regimes, and your thinking about such regimes is heavily influenced by your reading of George Orwell’s 1984. Imagine further that nothing from the novel appears explicitly in your essay, and your strongest reference to the book is describing these regimes as “Orwellian” in passing. Here there would be no need to cite 1984 directly, but it would be appropriate to list it in your bibliography. As always, if you’re unsure about a particular case, err on the side of providing a citation and a bibliography entry.

For international students, it’s especially important to review and understand the citation standards and expectations for institutions of higher learning in the United Kingdom. Students who have done their secondary studies in other countries may have learned research and paper-writing practices different from those at Kent. For example, students from schools in East Asia may learn that
copying directly from sources, without citation, is the proper way to write papers and do research. Students in France, preparing for the Baccalaureate examination, may be encouraged to memorize whole passages from secondary sources and copy them into papers and exam essays. Those cultural differences can sometimes lead to false assumptions about citation practices and expectations in the UK. Again, you are responsible for reading and understanding the University’s academic regulations.

If in doubt, ask your lecturers and seminar leaders for guidance.

 

How Do I Cite Electronic Sources?

Some traditional printed material is available in e-format, notably journal articles and books. In these cases, you can cite the electronic version exactly as you would a print version without the need to make it clear that this material was available electronically (this is usually the case for items on JSTOR, ProjectMuse or from e-books you find on the Library website).

However, for other items you may find online, the requirement to acknowledge your sources still holds. You may need to acknowledge
information that you’ve found in graphical form, sources that are works of visual or musical art, handwritten notes from a lecture or a laboratory, or even personal conversations. The best place to find details of precisely how to cite such things are citation style manual like the MLA Handbook or the Chicago Manual of Style.

Information and quotations from any electronic sources (blogs, websites, platforms, email etc.) must be properly acknowledged, including images. The protocols for citing electronic sources are now well-established, and you should consult a citation style manual for particular examples. At a minimum, cite the name and author of the website (if available), the Internet address, and the date you accessed the site.

When you use the web, you must be extremely careful about the validity of the information that you find. Unlike most books and journal articles, which undergo strict peer review before publication, much of the information on the web is self-published. See our guidance for using the internet for research purposes. Seldom will the author(s) of a website make explicit their own sources of information; there may be no way to trace the accuracy or authenticity of the information. Websites may provide partial, deceptive, or false information in order to promote explicit or hidden agendas. Often web-based information appears to have no author at all, or its author is seemingly anonymous, almost disembodied; this is never a good sign of intellectual honesty.

Finally, all of us are aware of websites that offer academic papers for sale or that offer to do the research and writing for you. The academic quality of such papers tends to fall short of standards acceptable in Classical and Archaeological Studies at Kent. Nevertheless, you should know that any use of such services by a student is considered not just plagiarism but academic fraud, and is subject to the most severe penalties.

How Can I Learn to Avoid Plagiarism?

The University of Indiana at Bloomington has put together excellent resources on academic integrity and plagiarism, and we encourage all students to use their material to ensure that they understand how to avoid plagiarism.

 

Are There Others Types of Academic Dishonesty?

Citation failures aren’t the only form of academic dishonesty.

False Citation. Citing a source when the material was obtained elsewhere also constitutes a violation of University regulations. For example, if you cite Plato’s Republic 373a in your essay, but you got the reference from Fine (1990) 21, you have committed false citation because you didn’t directly consult the source you have cited.

Submitting Work Twice. Without proper permission, submitting the identical or similar work in more than one module is also a violation of University regulations. It is subject to the same penalties as plagiarism and is sometimes referred to as ‘self-plagiarism’. This sometimes occurs when undertaking independent research in the third year. In order to avoid any possible misunderstanding, discuss your plans with your supervisor, who can help you avoid this problem.

Remember, too, that our community is built on trust, and so you should, in all of your official interactions with University personnel, particularly
in the academic realm, be honest.

 

Can I Work in Study Groups or with Other Students?

Yes you should, but use good judgement!

Collaboration. The standards for collaboration and independent work vary from module to module. Some lecturers allow students to work together on language homework or even turn in an assignment together; others allow students to discuss the language assignments, but require them to write up their
own answers; still others prohibit any collaboration at all on homework.

If you are unclear about the expectations and rules for your module, simply ask your lecturer. If you’re coming up on a deadline and you’re not sure what the module policy is, do your work independently. Never assume that you have permission to do a language assignment or archaeology lab report collaboratively. Given the variability across modules, it’s also very dangerous to rely on the “rules” from one to another. The wise
thing to do is to ask.

The penalty for copying weekly language assignments is just as severe as it is for plagiarism on a major research paper.

 

Online Discussion Groups. Most module convenors will also set out guidelines for informal modes of electronic communication in their module. For example, the course may have an e-mail discussion group to which students are expected to contribute. If in doubt, ask your lecturer whether and how you may cite these less than-formal communications between classmates and instructors.

 

Grey Areas. 

There are ‘grey areas’ of collaboration where you need to use your own good judgement to determine what is and is not allowed. Exercise caution to ensure that the assistance you give or receive is within acceptable limits.

Brainstorming ideas with someone else before writing is fine, and acting upon general suggestions for revision could also be fine. But writing, rewriting, or copy-editing another person’s paper is not fine, nor is telling someone exactly how to revise. Ask your module convenor before you compare your archaeological data or translation assignments with classmates.

 

Remember, your goal is to maintain the integrity of your own work and that of others.

If you do receive assistance from others—classmates, friends, or family members—acknowledge it in writing. In a long work, such as a dissertation, your acknowledgments might take up an entire section, which would appear after the table of contents and before the first chapter. In shorter papers, your acknowledgments would appear in a footnote or after your references.

 

One final caution: be careful about allowing others unauthorized access to your work. Don’t leave the library for a coffee break with your newly written history paper on the screen of your laptop; don’t let the hardcopy of your sociology take-home sit in the computer cluster printer for hours, or leave extra copies or earlier drafts around in public places. There’s no need to be unreasonably suspicious. Just use common sense to safeguard your work.

 

Academic Misconduct: The Disciplinary Process

If a student is alleged to have made any violation of the University’s academic regulations, the lecturer will gather and submit evidence from the assignment and any other relevant material to the Chair of the Division Academic Misconduct Committee for review. The student will be notified about the case, the penalty proposed by the Committee, or the need for a hearing. Students will be given an opportunity to respond by submitting evidence to the Committee in writing, or where deemed appropriate, in person.

Academic Misconduct Committees shall consist of three academic members of the Division, one of whom shall be appointed as Chair, and one student representative to be nominated by Kent Union. For the avoidance of doubt, neither the member(s) of staff raising the allegation of academic misconduct, nor any other staff member involved in the informal investigation of an allegation of misconduct, may be part of the Academic Misconduct Committee convened to consider the case.

If it is necessary for a hearing to be conducted in person, the student may be accompanied by a member of staff or a student of the University, or a member of staff of the Students’ Union, or a relative. At this stage the student may contest the allegation and proposed penalty before it is recorded and applied.

Students are also entitled to submit an appeal against the decisions of the Chairs/Academic Misconduct Committees, in line with the grounds for appeal set out in Annex 10 of the Credit Framework.

The severity of the penalties increases for recurring offences of academic misconduct.