Good Academic Practice¶
You are required to make good use of available reference material, public domain source code etc. However, you must do so according to correct procedures and conventions. In following the guidance in this document, you can adopt good practice in explaining which work is your own original contribution and the sources you have consulted.
If you do this incorrectly (such as by copying and pasting from web pages without indicating exactly what you have done, or using software that you have obtained from elsewhere without saying so) you may be accused of Unacceptable Academic Practice and lose a lot of marks or even be denied a degree.
Unacceptable academic practice¶
The University has regulations on Unacceptable Academic Practice. These regulations define a process to follow if there is suspicion that a student is attempting to submit work in their name that has actually been prepared by someone else, therefore attempting to gain an unfair advantage.
Note
To avoid being accused of Unacceptable Academic Practice, make sure you understand what is permissible and what is not. See below for guidance and requirements when:
Using written material and images from the web, from books or other sources;
Using, as part of the system you are developing, software that someone else has written.
About good practice¶
Science and Engineering make progress by building on the work and ideas of other people and so:
To place your work in context, your reports should refer to and discuss related work that has been done by others; this is of particular importance for the final year Major and Minor projects, but is also relevant to your other work.
It may be useful to quote short passages of text from books, scientific papers, the web, etc.
In your implementation, you may wish to use pieces of software that someone else has written . Note that not all projects in the department allow you to do this - please check with the module coordinator before you consider this.
All of this is encouraged, provided you follow normal procedures to make absolutely clear to the reader of your report and code which materials and ideas are your own and which are not, and in the case of those that are not, precisely where you obtained them. Remember that this in addition to your own original work.
The following sub-sections highlight some issues.
Using your own words¶
As you do wider reading about a topic or watch videos or listen to podcasts, build up a set of notes about the issues and ideas that you find most interesting in each source. Use your own words to summarise the main issues rather than just copying down a lot of quotes from the original text.
When you come to write your reports, look at your notes and use them as a starting point to write about the ideas. Include references in your References section for each of the resources that you have looked at. Cite those references from your report. The citation links your discussion to the relevant resources in the References section. The references then allow someone reading your report to look for further information when relevant.
Quoting sources¶
You may include a short verbatim section of another text (a book, a web site, a scientific paper etc.) in your Project Report provided that:
the section of text is enclosed in quotation marks ” “, AND …
its source is listed in your References section and is cited using an accepted convention, AND …
its length is limited to about a paragraph.
Students sometimes try to include a long paragraph from a particular source. However, it is often not relevant to your reader. It would be better to see you mention the idea and where it comes from, without needing to see the original quote; if your reader wants to see the full quote, the reference will provide enough information to find the original source.
Remember - copying and pasting large sections from web pages, or other sources, into your Project Report is NOT acceptable.
Ethics of citation¶
It is important to note that you include references that you have read, watched or listened to. Including and citing references that you have not read is unacceptable academic practice. It suggests that you have done more work to investigate the topic than you have actually done. That is also an example of you trying to gain an unfair advantage for the submitted work. Further, it raises questions of whether your markers and readers can trust the work that you produce.
Including and citing a reference does not necessarily mean you have read all of a resource, e.g. a whole book. However, it should indicate that you have read, watched or listened to the relevant part that you are referring to. Further, you should understand the context of that part within the whole source. If you do not understand the context for the part that you refer to, you risk misrepresenting what is said in the source.
