Academic integrity is a broad term which refers to the ethical responsibilities as well as professional value systems which guide a researcher in the course of interacting with both the community and research material in the course of writing and teaching as well. It entails the ability to establish and maintain an honest and truthful relationship with other scholars by upholding responsibility in the in the conduct of research as well as the professional standards. The aims of upholding academic integrity are for the achievement of excellence in research, creativity as well as excellence in writing as well as upholding the and maintenance of public trust with regard to the efforts put in place by different universities (Mushlin & Katz, 2013).
Academic integrity is meant to start from individual students within the universities and college by the maintenance of high level of honesty when it comes to academic and professional matters. Academic integrity puts a lot of emphasis on avoidance of plagiarism which is considered a form of cheating when a person writing a certain paper represents the work of another person as his or her own effort and work. The most common risk related plagiarized work is that which occurs when a writer does not comprehensively cite the original work where the information he or she is writing came from. There are many different styles of citation recommended by different institutions, however, there are different forms in which the written work can be said to be plagiarized, ranging from wrong paraphrasing, copy-pasting someone’s work, to lack of citations (Roig, 2010).
In order to avoid plagiarizing your work, it is important to adhere to the guidelines set by the American Psychological Association, the guidelines are essential for offering the due credit to the original authors of the sources in which a writer is obtaining information from. It also helps the reader to identify when the author uses a given source to support the written information and finally it acts as a guide for the reader through the references to the full publication for clarification (Roig, 2010).
In order to ensure that your work is not plagiarized it is important to ensure that your work is properly cited, this is important because it benefits both the reader and the author (Mushlin & Katz, 2013). If the work is not cited properly the author will not be in a position to identify the sources the author was using and this will make the author think all the information in a certain work is only based on the opinions and ideas of the author and not research. Finally, lack of citations makes the reader experience difficulty in tracing the source of information an author has written. By properly citing academic work the author upholds his or her integrity and establishes a personal relationship and credibility with other authors in the scholarly field ("Ensuring Academic Integrity - ASC Success Strategies - Academic Guides at Walden University", 2016).
References
Mushlin, S. & Katz, J. (2013). Academic Integrity. Academic Medicine, 88(11), 1598-1599.
Roig, M. (2010). Plagiarism and self-plagiarism: What every author should know. Biochemia Medica, 295-300.
Ensuring Academic Integrity - ASC Success Strategies - Academic Guides at Walden University. (2016). Academicguides.waldenu.edu. Retrieved 14 June 2016, from http://academicguides.waldenu.edu/ASCsuccess/integrity
