As part of the mandate of the First Year Seminar Program, we will pay particularly close attention to academic integrity issues in this course.  Our goal is to prepare  you to conduct your work with utmost academic integrity for the next four years of your Middlebury career.  Please be assured that if you do not understand all of the conventions of academic citation at the start of your Middlebury career, there are many resources to assist you.  In addition to the training you will receive in this course, you can ask me, another professor, or any of the reference librarians if you have a particular question related to citation or academic honesty more generally. You can also consult staff members in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research.

PROPER CITATION PRACTICES

In your work for this course, as in all your intellectual work, you should use proper citation methods.  By properly citing sources, whether print, electronic, or web-based, you situate yourself within a scholarly conversation, give credit where credit is due, and avoid the serious academic offense of plagiarism.

When to cite:

Whenever you use other writers’ ideas, paraphrase, or use quotations in your writing, you must credit the author–in the text with a citation and in the bibliography.

The following explanation is excerpted from the Yale College Center for Teaching and Learning website:

ALWAYS CITE, in the following cases:

1) When you quote two or more words verbatim, or even one word if it is used in a way that is unique to the source.

2) When you introduce facts that you have found in a source.

3) When you paraphrase or summarize ideas, interpretations, or conclusions that you find in a source

4) When you introduce information that is not common knowledge or that may be considered common knowledge in your field, but the reader may not know it..

5) When you borrow the plan or structure of a larger section of a source’s argument (for example, using a theory from a source and analyzing the same three case studies that the source uses).

6) When you build on another’s method found either in a source or from collaborative work in a lab.

7) When you build on another’s program in writing computer code or on a not-commonly-known algorithm.

8) When you collaborate with others in producing knowledge.

How to cite:

In this course, we will use the Chicago Manual of Style.  For examples of how to cite using the Chicago manual of Style, you can consult the Chicago Manual of Style Quick Guide.

 

Please remember that plagiarism is a serious violation of Middlebury’s Honor Code.