Referencing at MIT: Home

Plagiarism is the word we use when someone uses another person's work and claims it as their own.

Plagiarism is theft of ideas and words, and MIT takes it very seriously. If you are caught plagiarising, you could face severe penalties.

Plagiarism includes:

• Copying words from a website and pasting them into your assignment,
• "Borrowing" a friend's assignment and submitting it yourself,
• Submitting an assignment from one subject as an assignment for another subject (self-plagiarism).

Avoid plagiarism by using academic information and citing your sources.

Referencing is how we avoid plagiarism by acknowledging our sources. On top of that, referencing generally follows a set style for consistency and accuracy.

The styles used by Melbourne Institute of Technology are APA Style (used by the School of Business) and IEEE (used by the School of IT and Engineering). You can find more information about each style on the following pages.

There are three reasons to reference your work:

1. Avoid plagiarism
   Plagiarism is a form of theft and cheating, and MIT does not tolerate it. We all need to use others’ ideas, so referencing ensures that we credit our sources properly.
2. Show you’ve done the research
   Referencing and citing our sources demonstrates that we know what we’re talking about. We’ve done the research and we can be taken seriously as writers.
3. Let your readers find your sources
   It’s a good idea to show our readers where we got the information we used from. They might want to double check our facts or learn more about the topic. Good referencing makes this easy.