3.2. How do I use the information chosen?
3.2.3. Quoting
Quoting involves providing information on the source, the authorship of the material and of the information we used to create new content.
According to the Intellectual Property Act, works that have already been distributed may be used if the source is properly quoted and if they are used with a clear intention to analyse them for an education-related purpose.
“It is lawful to include, in a work of one’s own, fragments of other works from other authors, whether they are written, sound-related or audio-visual in nature, as well as fragments of single works in fine arts or in figurative photography, as long as these works have already been distributed and as long as they are included as a quote or for their analysis, comment or critical appraisal. Such use will only be allowed for educational or research purposes, as long as the inclusion is justified and if the source and the name of the author of the work used are provided”.
In this case, if the bibliographic references used are collected, the ideas are quoted and the text content is paraphrased properly, we are not committing plagiarism.
Quoting, following the standard regulations by the ISO 690 rule or others such as the APA rule (American Psychological Association), on electronic references, provides an immediate credibility endorsement for our contents and provides readers with fast access to the original sources of information.
The same happens the other way around: when assessing the reliability of a content, we may focus on the quotes regarding the information origin and sources. A proper quotation, in which original sources may be contrasted, endorses the credibility of the content and its author.
If we suspect of plagiarism or of the wrongful use of some content by a given information source, we may also perform a basic check by choosing a significant fragment of the questionable text and performing a literal search –in inverted commas− in a top-power generalist search engine, such as Google or Alltheweb. The search engine will show us the detected websites that contain the literal text in their results list.
Other tools are available to detect written plagiarism: for example: Plagiarism detector or Plagiarisma or to find the original source of an image (TinEye).
In the UOC Library, we may find resources to obtain more information on intellectual property and on how to avoid plagiarism: