Plagiarism is the act of taking another person's writing, conversation, song, or even idea and passing it off as your own. This includes information from web pages, books, songs, television shows, email messages, interviews, articles, artworks or any other medium. Whenever you paraphrase, summarize, or take words, phrases, or sentences from another person's work, it is necessary to indicate the source of the information within your paper using an internal citation. It is not enough to just list the source in a bibliography at the end of your paper. Failing to properly quote, cite or acknowledge someone else's words or ideas with an internal citation is plagiarism.
Once you understand that plagiarism is using another's words/work or ideas and claiming them as your own, you should have an idea how to avoid plagiarising.
View the following video from the Madison Research Essentials Toolkit to learn more about the value of information.
Credit for the compilation of select lists of resources is given to the University of Memphis.