in re plagiarism and citation and people not knowing how to do it
in the capstone class of my MASTER's degree, I had to do a group paper with fellow students who had all done 6+ years of collegiate study to get there
we shared drafts of our portions and they had no citations and i was like???? and they were like "it's a draft i'll put the citations in at the end" and i was like ???????
because by the time you're done writing the thing you're not going to remember what you got where and whether you synthesized information together! this is how "i thought i thought of it" plagiarism cases occur!!!!
anyway i told them at the bare minimum any time they referenced a numerical figure they needed to cite it, and since it was a paper on accounting fraud that mostly worked out. but i could tell they were citing stuff simply because i'd told them to cite where numbers came from, because they didn't bother to cite some non-numerical things that definitely needed it.
anyway this is why when you have classes that have multiple assignments for a paper to teach you how to write it, annotated bibliography comes before drafting. because you're supposed to have your sources and know what's in them when you start writing.
to current college students: PLEASE put the citations in as you're writing not as you're editing. i know it seems like a pita especially if you don't know the formatting well, but that's what tools like Purdue Owl are for. Tell it what citation format you're supposed to use, what kind of source you have, fill in the fields and it will format the citation for you.
