Like freedom of speech, academic honesty holds a special place in a community devoted to the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. For this reason, it is important for you to learn how to acknowledge the contributions of others in your own work and to document properly your reliance on their thinking.
Discovering how to use others’ work to advance your own is a key part of learning. Very few of us ever have completely original ideas; even the thinking of the greatest scholars is developed from the achievements of scholars who preceded them. Understanding how to incorporate others’ points into your own arguments, and to acknowledge them properly, is one sign of maturing scholarship.
It is especially important for you to learn about documentation and citation because failure to understand and use these practices—even when inadvertent—is considered a grave breach of academic integrity. Detailed in greater length in the Undergraduate Regulations, the concept of academic dishonesty or cheating includes any misrepresentation of others’ work as your own, such as unacknowledged paraphrasing or quoting, use of another student’s material, incomplete acknowledgment of sources (including Internet sources), or submission of the same work to complete the requirements of more than one class.
You can learn more about conventions of using sources by referring to the Yale College Writing Center’s Web site, www.yale.edu/writing. If ever you have doubts about when or how to cite, ask the teacher of the course, your writing tutor, or your residential college dean.
