Students must be careful not to violate the copyright laws of the United States. The inclusion of an entire work (e.g., a survey instrument, a text, a model, or a figure) by another author requires that written permission from the copyright holder be included as an appendix. Information regarding the source and the copyright holder must be included with the item with the statement “Reprinted with permission," or similar statement as required by your chosen style guide.
The current and less provocative term for using the words of others without proper citation is “unoriginality.” The more inflammatory term for using and taking credit for someone else’s work is “plagiarism.” Plagiarism is defined as literary theft and/or fraud; it is the ultimate academic offense, but the label is applied after the theft of intellectual product(s) has been discovered and its theft and fraudulent use have been adjudicated. Faculty members and students are innocent until proven guilty. Avoiding unoriginality is a required skill of scholars and is learnable.
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