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Writer's pictureHermann Fink

Plagiarism and The Importance of Citations

No one wants to be a thief. Coming to Canada as an international student makes you face many challenges. You need to work in a new culture, learn a new language, engage in social interactions, and cite work for your research papers without stealing other people’s work.


What is plagiarism?


Plagiarism deals with intellectual theft. It is the practice of taking another person’s work and making it look like you came up with it. Therefore, whenever we borrow a quote or statistic or are rephrasing the knowledge we got from another source, we must tell the reader (your instructor) where we got it from.


We’re talking about this topic to you because we know there are many countries outside of Canada where this is not necessarily seen as a problem. However, Canada has financial penalties associated with plagiarism under the Copyright Act and you could get fined for not disclosing where you got information from. Especially if it is a written piece that is making you money.


The fees can go from $100 to $20,000 depending on the severity of the infringement.


Citation styles and why they matter


Of course we know your homework won’t get you fined. However, instructors will often fail you if you don’t use citations and that’s what we want to prevent. Therefore, you should know about citation styles.


Citation styles are best practices and guides on how to write papers and how you should let other people know when you’ve taken knowledge from a book, website, or other source of information. The most popular citation styles in North America are APA and MLA.


Following a citation style is important because:

  1. It will prevent you from failing an assignment.

  2. It makes sure you present citation information in a standardized way.


The one we will cover today is APA because it is the most common one among post-grad programs in BC. APA stands for American Psychological Association and it is the entity responsible for providing these guidelines on how to format content. The style guide is an entire book that covers:


  1. Design: The guide tells you how to number pages, how to format a table of contents, what information should go on the first page (cover) of your paper, what line spacing to use and how to format headers.


  2. Bias-free language: It teaches you how to review your work to make sure you are properly addressing topics when you talk about a certain age group, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or historical context.


  3. In-text citations: The one that this article is focused on. This tells you how to paraphrase, types of citations you should be using per source, how to format direct quotes, and most importantly, how to connect all of this to the list of references you will have on the final pages of your paper.


You may know a list of references as a bibliography, which is the common name given to this section in middle school (when we start learning about plagiarism). If you are not familiar with this, don’t worry.


The references is a list of ALL the sources you took information from which have to be placed in a certain order. In APA, this list has to be in alphabetical order by last name of the first author of your sources.


Where to learn APA


We know this is not a fun topic. Therefore, we will leave it here and tell you where to find additional information if you want to learn APA.


  • Rent the APA style guide 7th edition from the public library.

  • Ask your school if they have an online version of the style guide you can access on their digital library (if they have one).

  • Buy the guide from Amazon.

  • Go to my favourite website: Purdue OWL


Citation styles can prevent you from failing


Remember that the most important thing is learning the citation style required by your school. This will help you get better grades, graduate from your program, and take you one step closer to the reason you came to Canada for.


We also suggest you ask other students whenever you have questions. Chances are they have already learned a few tricks to learn to cite better. Join our Slack community if you would like to meet other international students!

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