Biological Sciences
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is... the act of utilising ideas or words from another piece of work in your assignment without properly referencing or citing it, in order to show your readers where the work came from. The concept has also been extended to bad use of sources within your assignments, where most of the words and phrasing may be lifted from another piece of work.
The university uses software called 'TurnItIn'... which checks for unoriginal writing to try and prevent plagiarism. An accusation of plagiarism may result in referral, resubmission or be classed as an academic offense, leading to dismissal from a course, so it is important to be familiar with what may consitute plagiarism.
In most cases, good note-making and correct referencing and citation will help you to avoid plagiarism... but this page contains some resources that may help you better understand what might constitute plagiarism and therefore, how to avoid it.
You might find 'The Plagiarism Spectrum' useful. This is advice from TurnItIn on the different types on plagiarism so you can know what to avoid, and includes examples with a source text, demonstrating how students could be plagiarising it.
There is also an updated version below that describes forms of plagiarism, but without the examples.
Turnitin Plagiarism Spectrum
About referencing
Citing and referencing is an important part of the academic writing process and an element of your overall mark will go towards the quality of your referencing.
Whenever you use ideas, quotes or other material, for example images and raw data, you must acknowledge both in the text (citation) and at the end of your work (reference list). You do this:
- To acknowledge the work of others and avoid plagiarism
- To demonstrate you have read at an appropriate academic level
- To demonstrate you have gathered credible quality sources of information to support your ideas and arguments
- To allow your reader to locate the material you have used
For Biological Sciences you are expected to reference in the Plymouth Cite Them Right Harvard Style and we have comprehensive resources to help you use this style. However, any Harvard style, applied consistently, is generally accepted.
Alongside the information on this page you may find our Library Skills page on Referencing and Plagiarism useful.
We have a subscription to Cite Them Right to support you in referencing in the Plymouth Cite Them Right style.
You can use this tool in three ways:
1. Use the tutorial (top right of Cite Them Right). Create a free account to track your progress and work through the tutorial to learn the basics of referencing.
2. Go to the 'basics' section to look up how to reference in your citation style. Useful parts here include: an example bibliography, setting out citations to learn what to do with multiple authors, no author and other such cases, and an example bibliography.
3. Look up whatever you need to reference either using the search box or by browsing through the categories of item in the top bar menu.
You may also want to try our in house referencing tutorial below to gain confidence in referencing using practice examples. Additionally, below the tutorial there is information on finding the information required to reference and tips on referencing in the style of a journal.
Online Tutorial
Where to find reference information
Publication details of a book should be included in a cover page. This will include the publisher, place of publication,date and any edition information.
If you don't have the book in front of you - look at the details section on Primo or search on the British Library's catalogue.
Journal articles should always state which journal they are published in - typically this will be on the first page (either at the bottom or 
top of the page.)
They may also include this as a header/footer within the article.
If you are using a specific news item from a website then the heading would be the title of the resource/article. This one gives the journalist/ writer who wrote the piece as well as the date. If there were no details you would need to find out who the author/ organisation was - the best way to find this out is to look for an about us tab.
When searching on a website you may go straight to the PDF of the document. To find out the reference details have a look at the URL. The best way to get all the details if you can't find them from the report is to look at the organisation's website and search for the title of this document. This should provide all the details you need for your reference.
Referencing in the style of...
If your assignment asks you to reference in the style of a specific journal you will need to check the 'author guidelines' or 'formatting' instructions on the journal page. On the whole this will involve formatting the article yourself.
You may wish to try this tool to help format your citations: https://citation.crosscite.org/
Just paste the doi of an article in, select the style and ensure it is in en-GB for British English.
Alternatively, Zotero have a free tool that may be of use for compiling the bibliography part of your referencing: https://zbib.org/
Endnote Online does include a handful of other styles and it is worth reading the author guidelines carefully as many journals state that they adopt one of the main styles included in Endnote Online (e.g. APA). Otherwise you will have to reformat the references manually after removing the coding at the end of your work.
Endnote Desktop will allow you to add many more styles from various journals but is not worth learning to use for a single assignment and is mainly recommended for PGR students who will benefit more from adopting it. We have separate guidance on using Endnote Desktop.