The University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College Handbook defines plagiarism this way:

"Offering the work of another as one’s own without proper acknowledgment is plagiarism. Therefore, any student who fails to give appropriate credit for ideas or material he/she takes from another, whether fellow student or a resource writer, is guilty of plagiarism. This includes downloading or buying papers from the Internet and cutting and pasting from the Internet without proper acknowledgment."

Once you have found your sources, evaluated them for quality, and written your paper, you will need to properly give credit to these sources.  So, how do you do that? 

This process is called citing, and there are several possible ways to do it, depending on the subject area of the course.  The following pages will explain how to use a few of the major citation styles to make sure you give proper credit to your sources.

MLA

APA

Do you know what plagiarism is?  You Quote It, You Note It is a 10-minute, interactive tutorial that will get you up to speed.

Produced by Cape Fear Community College

For more information about plagiarism and citing sources, take a look at these materials available in the PTC Libraries: