Biology Information Literacy Part I: Resources & the Library: Ethics in Student Work

Your Biology Laboratory work will depend on collaboration and sharing data within your groups. The analysis and summarization of your results must be your own work in your own words.

For even more information, check out these sites:

Citing the work that supports your research is both an ethical issue and a legal issue.

The ethics of citing is based on the scholarly tradition of giving credit for information and ideas that are not one's own. Science has a long tradition of acknowledging priority through citations. You have the ethical responsibility to cite all works that were used to support your research, to give credit to the earlier work and to provide a clear path for those who follow in your footsteps.

Or, to put it another way:

An example of some legal aspects of citing can be found in Copyrights, Title 17 of the U.S. Code, which describes the legal protections of authors' and creators' intellectual property rights within U.S. law.

*Pukui MK. 1983. ʻŌlelo Noʻeau : Hawaiian Proverbs & Poetical Sayings. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. [1261] p.137.

Plagiarism is defined as:

"The action or practice of taking someone else's work, idea, etc., and passing it off as one's own; literary theft"

"plagiarism, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press.  Available from: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/144939

The UH Mānoa Student Conduct Code includes plagiarism under prohibited activities.

The UH Mānoa Catalog states:

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to

• submitting, to satisfy an academic requirement, any document that has been copied in whole or in part from another individual's work without identifying that individual
• neglecting to identify as a quotation a documented idea that has not been assimilated into the student's language and style
• paraphrasing a passage so closely that the reader is misled as to the source
• submitting the same written or oral material in more than one course without obtaining authorization from the instructors involved
• and "dry-labbing," which includes obtaining and using experimental data from other students without the express consent of the instructor, utilizing experimental data and laboratory write-ups from other sections of the course or from previous terms, and fabricating data to fit the expected results