Appendix 4. Proper Attribution (Memo from Granger)

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
Inter-Office Correspondence

TO: EPP Ph.D. Students

FROM: G. Morgan

DATE: 2009 August 21

SUBJECT: Proper attribution of the work of others

In your time here in EPP, and your subsequent professional career, you will have frequent occasion to draw up the work of others. While that is clearly necessary and appropriate, it is also critically important that when you do this you include proper citations. Copying other peoples’ text or figures, or only slightly modifying it, without identifying the source is called plagiarism and is a breach of professional ethics.

Here are the basic rules:

If you use any text written by someone else in any of your work, you must place it in quotation marks and provide a citation for the source. Thus, for example, you may say:

It has now been demonstrated that: “Large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer.” (Keith et al., 2004)

but you may not say:

It has now been demonstrated that large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer.

You can of course also use numbered footnotes or endnotes. If you use the (Author, date) form of citation, then these should be paired with full references, sufficient for a reader to find the source, as at the end of this memo. If the reference is a web source, include the web address.

Under the “fair use” terms of U.S. copyright law, it is perfectly fine to quote, with proper attribution, short excerpts from copyrighted works. If you start using very large portions of copyrighted text, you may need to obtain permission from the holder of the copyright (typically the journal, not the author) if you are going to publish the piece or distribute it widely. Obtaining such permission is generally not required for government documents.

If you use someone else’s ideas or arguments but place them in your own words, then you must cite the original source. For example you may say:

Because wind turbines efficiently extract kinetic energy from the boundary layer and alter turbulent transport, large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate. (Keith et al., 2004)

but you may not say:

Because wind turbines efficiently extract kinetic energy from the boundary layer and alter turbulent transport, large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate.

Facts or ideas which are not general knowledge also need to be referenced. For example:

Foreign student enrollments at LaRoche College in the Pittsburgh area dropped by 23.7% between 2002-3 and 2003-4. (Schackner, 2004)

The same goes for figures taken from other sources, including off the Internet. All such figures must carry a citation. For example:

Figure from Keith et al., (2004)

Additionally, if you are actually publishing the figure or placing it in a document that will be widely circulated, you will likely need to obtain reprint permission from the holder of the copyright. For use in papers internal to EPP that is not necessary.

Similarly, if you redraw a figure you should indicate the original sources. For example:

Figure modified from Keith et al., (2004)

The one exception is publicly available clip art used in things like power-point presentations.

The University rules on cheating and plagiarism can be found at: http://www.cmu.edu/policies/documents/Cheating.html

There are many different style guides for references. Different professional journals have different rules, which you can usually find at their web sites. The program “End Notes” can handle most of them.

Bottom line: We, and all of the scientific and technical community, take these issues very seriously. Failure to follow proper procedures for attributing the words, illustrations or ideas of others is a very serious violation of the norms of good professional practice. Such activities will not be tolerated in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy and will result in stiff penalties that could include immediate loss of support and/or a request that you leave the graduate program (appeal options are spelled out in the student handbook).

References:

David W. Keith, Joseph F. DeCarolis, David C. Denkenberger, Donald H. Lenschow, Sergey L. Malyshev, Stephen Pacala, and Philip J. Rasch, “The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 101(46), pp. 16115-16120, 2004. Available online http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/101/46/16115.

Bill Schackern, “Visas, other problems cut foreign student enrollment,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 10, 2004.

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