The fifth and final step in Information Literacy is to ethically use the resources you have gathered in your paper or project. This means that you need to correctly cite them both in the text of your paper and in your references, works cited, or bibliography.
Even though information, words, and ideas are not concrete, they still can be stolen by them not being cited and those who commit plagiarism get in trouble.
Ethical use of information means using information ethically. Clear as mud, right? Actually, there are two ways that very clearly deal with this concept. They are plagiarism and copyright. Both deal with giving credit where credit is due and using other people's work correctly. Even though information, words, and ideas are not concrete, they still can be stolen and those that do that can still get in trouble.
According to The College of St. Scholastica's Academic Honesty Policy located in the Student Handbook,
The most common form of plagiarism when it comes to resources and research is misrepresentation of the work of others as one's own and using someone else's ideas or words without giving credit.
Plagiarism and other academic dishonesty includes but is not limited to the following:
At The College of St. Scholastica, academic dishonesty can result in failure of an assignment, a course, being denied admission to or dismissed from a department or program, exclusion from extracurricular activities, or expulsion from the College even on the first instance of academic dishonesty.
More information on academic honesty from the College's Student Affairs Academic Policies.
At CSS, Turnitin is embedded in Brightspace, so faculty wishing to have students use Turnitin should get information from our Center for Instructional Design (CID).
Turnitin compares submitted papers to its database full of Internet sites, other papers, and online resources. It generates an originality report which can be used to check for plagiarism and to double check student's work.
This is a serious but humorous explanation of copyright.