APA Style provides guidelines to help writers determine the appropriate level of citation and how to avoid plagiarism and self-plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the act of presenting the words, ideas, or images of another as your own; it denies authors or creators of content the credit they are due. Whether deliberate or unintentional, plagiarism violates ethical standards in scholarship (see APA Ethics Code Standard 8.11, Plagiarism).
Writers who plagiarize disrespect the efforts of original authors by failing to acknowledge their contributions, stifle further research by preventing readers from tracing ideas back to their original sources, and unfairly disregard those who exerted the effort to complete their own work.
To avoid plagiarism, provide appropriate credit to your sources by adding author–date in-text citations for direct quotations and ideas (e.g., credit the originators of theories). If you model a study after one conducted by someone else, give credit to the author of the original study.
If you wish to reprint or adapt tables, figures, and images or to reprint long quotations or commercially copyrighted test items, you must provide more comprehensive credit in the form of a copyright attribution and may need permission from the copyright holder to use the materials. Even images from the internet that are free or licensed in the Creative Commons need a copyright attribution if you are reproducing them in your paper. For more information about copyright and permissions, see Sections 12.14–12.18 of the Publication Manual (7th ed.).
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