Library Guide Science: Plagiarism FAQ

• Submit someone else’s work as your own;
• Partly or fully adopt the text, ideas, conclusions, designs and/or theories of someone else without stating the source (book, journal article, report, website, etc.);
• Use information or adapt information without stating the source;
• Use work for more than one purpose without stating that this is the case (self-plagiarism);
• Submit work that you have written together with someone else without explicitly stating that fact;
• Invent a source;
• Cite or paraphrase without clearly stating that you are doing so;
• Incorrectly or incompletely refer to a source;
• In the case of citation, failure to use quotation marks or place them so that the impression is given that part of the citation is your own work;
• Refer to sources, but not in every instance that information from the source is used, so that part of the information used is presented as your own work;
• Refer to a source in such a way that it cannot be found;
• Write a dissertation, thesis or other written text in which more of the text is from a single source (even though the source is referenced) than from your own work.

• Changing the results/data from an experiment (e.g. because the student sees that his results differ from those of his fellow students and thinks that his are probably incorrect);
• Inventing the results of an experiment or questionnaire;
• Quoting text from the Internet or from books/journals without providing a reference;
• Paraphrasing a text from another person without providing a reference;
• Submitting the work of another student who followed the same course several years earlier or who has followed a similar course at a different university;
• Submitting the same piece of work for two different subjects without discussing this first with the lecturers concerned or requesting an exemption (e.g. an assignment on ethics for an Introduction to philosophy course and an Animal sciences course).

The Examination Board is charged with disciplining students who have committed plagiarism (Art.  7.12b, paragraph 2, WHW). The Examination Board for the course concerned may decide to take various sanctions, depending on the severity and extent of the plagiarism detected, such as:

• a reprimand;
• exclusion from the examination or from further participation in the examination of which the assignment was a part;
• declaration of the result of the examination in which plagiarism was detected as invalid;
• exclusion from participation in the next possible examination retake;
• exclusion from participation in one or more examinations for a period of up to 12 months.

It is actually quite simple: you will never commit plagiarism if you clearly state the work of others by accurately working with references, citations and paraphrasing. How to do this, and the rules that you need to take into account, are explained below.