33 Academic Integrity and APA Citation

At NSCC, it’s important that you complete your work with honesty and integrity.

Academic Integrity means completing all of your work in an honest and ethical way. This includes giving credit to other people when using their ideas (citing sources).

When you write your assignments and research papers you’ll include information from sources you’ve found in your research. When you use other people’s ideas, words, images, or other content, it’s very important to cite them properly to avoid plagiarism.

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is using someone else’s work and not acknowledging it with a citation.

NSCC defines plagiarism as “presenting, in any format, someone else’s ideas, presentations, writing, artistic work, or creations, whether verbal, print, structural, design or electronic, in whole or in part, as one’s own, by failing to credit the source. Plagiarism can be intentional or occur through carelessness”^[1]

If a student is caught plagiarizing, they may be asked to redo their assignment, lose marks, get a zero on the assignment, and in severe cases, may be suspended from the College. If a student is found to have plagiarized, they may have to attend an academic hearing with their faculty member, Advisor, and Academic Chair. You can read the NSCC Academic Integrity Policy and Procedure  (NSCC Office 365 login required) to understand your responsibilities as a student. 

Remember: “I didn’t mean to” is not an excuse for plagiarism. It is considered plagiarism whether it is intentional or not.

How to avoid plagiarizing

• Use in-text citations and a reference list to indicate which parts of your assignment or paper came from individuals whose ideas, theories, or research have directly influenced your work.
• Cite all of your sources including, but not limited to books, journals, newspapers, videos, audio, images, websites, social media, personal communications, government documents.
• At NSCC, we primarily use APA Style (7th edition) for citation and reference formatting. The APA Citation Style Guide can help you find the proper citation format to fit the different type of sources you’ve used in your assignment or paper.
• When in doubt, your Campus Library staff can help.

In-text citations

In-text citations give enough information to lead your reader to the connected reference on your Reference page.

• A direct quote involves reproducing another author’s ideas word for word and representing this with quotation marks.
• An indirect quote (paraphrase) involves taking information from the original source and paraphrasing or putting it into your own words. Paraphrasing can be tricky and takes practice. When in doubt, use a direct quote.

Reference Page

Your Reference page is the final page of your assignment, paper, or Brightspace post. It contains a full list of the sources used  to create your assignment.  Your references tell your reader where you found your information, and include enough information to locate the original sources used.

An Example of using apa style in your assignment

In-text citation example – Direct Quote

“In Alaska, the ground is riddled with ice wedges that were created during the last glaciation” (Kolbert, 2006, p. 16).

In-text citation examples – Indirect Quote (Paraphrasing)

According to Kolbert (2006) Alaska’s landscape changed dramatically during the last glacial period.

Alaska’s landscape changed dramatically during the last glacial period (Kolbert, 2006).

 Reference list entry

Locate the following information from the source and include it on the Reference page:

Author. (Publication Date). Title. Publisher.

Example

Kolbert, E. (2006). Field notes from a catastrophe: Man, nature, and climate change. Bloomsbury.