Plagiarism
To plagiarize means using somebody else's work or ideas and presenting it as your own.
When students plagiarize, they typically:
- Use someone else’s text and only substitute a few words for synonyms, change the word order or grammar. This is considered as plagiarism regardless of if references are provided or not.
- Use another person’s work and present it as their own.
- Copy and paste text from a web page without citing or referencing the source.
- Use another author’s text and rephrase it in their own words but without providing a reference.
- Use their own previously submitted text in a new study assignment without referencing the original work. This is called self-plagiarism.
To make sure you avoid plagiarizing, use appropriate and correct citing and paraphrasing practices when writing academic texts.
What happens if a student has plagiarized?
Plagiarism is a serious offense against good academic practice and can if worse comes to worst result in temporary suspension from studies by decision of The Disciplinary Board at Linköping University.
A student who is suspended may not participate in lectures, laboratory sessions, seminars, exams, tutorials, assignments, and may not have access to LiU's computer labs. The suspension may also affect payment of student support.
Plagiarism detection systems used at LiU
Linköping University can submit student texts to Ouriginal, which is a plagiarism-checking tool for teachers. Submitted texts are checked against a very large database of material taken from the Internet, published material and student material.
Plagiarism-check of publications at a higher scientific level and theses, can be done using Similarity Check which check against academic sources such as journal articles and the Internet. At LiU, Similarity Check is only used on behalf of doctoral students and researchers.
NoPlagiat self-study tutorial
To promote students’ knowledge of copyright and abilities in citing and referencing, Linköping University Library has created a self-study tutorial, called NoPlagiat. LiU teachers have the option to incorporate NoPlagiat as part of their courses in Linköping University's learning platform Lisam.