Terms of Ethical Scholarship

Academic Integrity: “The concept of academic integrity involves understanding what it means to be honest in the particular culture of the academic world, and being able to apply the scholarly conventions of acknowledgment.” (Source: Julianne East and Lisa Donnelly, “Taking Responsibility for Academic Integrity”)

Academic Misconduct: Dishonest or unethical academic behavior that includes, but is not limited to, misrepresenting mastery in an academic area (e.g., cheating), failing to properly credit information, research or ideas to their rightful originators or representing such information, research or ideas as your own (e.g., plagiarism). (Source: Appendix A of UConn’s Student Code)

Annotated Bibliography: A list of texts that includes full bibliographic information for each, followed by a brief contextualization and summary of the source in prose.

Attribution: The action of indicating that a statement, manner of phrasing, or idea belongs to another writer.

Citation: When you use a specific source in your own work, you quote, summarize, “render,” or otherwise “make use” of the material and include the bibliographic information in an appropriate format (for example, MLA Style). For our courses, students briefly note the source at the end of the quotation using “parenthetical citation” and include the full bibliographic information in a “Works Cited” page.

Collaborative Writing: “Any writing done in collaboration with one or more persons.” UConn’s First-Year Writing Program interprets “collaboration” broadly to refer to anything from “two or more people working together to produce one written document in a situation in which a group takes responsibility for having produced the document” to “a peer’s critiquing of a [fellow student’s] draft.” (Source: Lisa S. Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford, Singular Texts/Plural Authors)

Community: A group of individuals collaborating to provide support and to discuss and develop projects, ideas, and conversations. “Community” operates in several modes: the academic community, composed not only of members of the academy but also of critical texts, the community of the classroom, and discourse communities, comprising a shared understanding of a particular way of communicating. The First-Year Writing program encourages student-led discussion in order to foster community in FYW classrooms and to develop a discourse community for each particular course.

Contribution: Rather than thinking of student writing as simply reproducing “truth” or demonstrating knowledge of various topics, we encourage an approach to student work that focuses on students finding a stake in the texts, testing and exploring the terms and implications of others’ work and texts, and adding something new to classroom and academic discussions, conversations, and communities. Contributions in First-Year Writing typically emerge out of collaborative engagement with texts and writing projects.

Documentation: The practice of acknowledging sources and sharing information about sources with the reader.

Ethics: “The codes of conduct or moral principles recognized in a particular profession, sphere of activity, relationship, or other context or aspect of human life.” (Source: Oxford English Dictionary)

Parenthetical Citation: A citation that appears in the text of an essay, enclosed in parentheses and usually at the end of a sentence. Parenthetical citations of print sources commonly include the author’s last name and page number.

Reference: The bibliographic information for a given source.

Works Cited: A list of the sources cited in an essay. Each entry provides full bibliographic information on a source (for example: author’s name, title, publisher, year of publication). The citation style that you follow will specify which information you should include for your sources and how you should format the entries on your Works Cited page.