What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is copying someone else’s work or idea and passing it off as your own, without proper acknowledgement. It is a form of theft and deception, an unethical act. Learn more from the HKU plagiarism webpage.
By properly citing the sources in your writings, you are both identifying the resources that you used to complete your work and formally acknowledging the authors or creators of those resources.
How to cite?
In academic writing, you need to give credit to the sources you referred to avoid academic cheating. Citation style governs the formatting of the academic paper, in-text citations and references.
For different subjects, you may be required to use different citation styles. For example MLA is common in humanities while APA is common in social sciences. Check with your instructors about which citation style to use before you write your papers.
Need more information on the different citations styles? Check-out this reading list for resources on various citation styles.
Below are free citation generators that help you in formating your in-text citations and references.
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EasyBib |
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Mendeley |
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Scribbr APA Citation Generator |
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Scribbr MLA Citation Generator |
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Zotero |
How to cite ChatGPT?
Quick guides:
Other guides:
How to avoid unintentional plagiarism?
Turnitin offers Originality Check on students' work for proper citation or potential plagiarism. Once a paper is submitted to Turnitin, it will compare with documents in a continuously updated database consisting of current and archived web pages, millions of student papers worldwide, and collections of newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, e-Books and e-Texts.
Check out Turnitin@HKU SPACE.