from the Library's Plagiarism web site (http://lib.nmsu.edu/plagiarism/)
What it is: Plagiarism is using another person's work without acknowledgment, making it appear to be one's own.
How to Avoid it: Ideas, words, pictures, or other intellectual content, taken from another source must be acknowledged in a citation that gives credit to the source.
This is true no matter where the material comes from, including the Internet, other students' work, unpublished materials, or oral sources.
Intentional and unintentional instances of plagiarism are considered instances of academic misconduct and are subject to disciplinary action such as failure on the assignment, failure of the course or dismissal from the university.
It is the responsibility of the student submitting the work in question to know, understand, and comply with this policy.
Some Examples of plagiarism if no citation is given:
(This list is not meant to include all possible examples of plagiarism)
Vocabulary:
Paraphrase - Putting another person's ideas into your own words. This is not a quote, but you still need a citation giving credit for the idea.
Verbatim - An exact quoting of words, with no changes. All quotes should be verbatim
Citation - This contains all the information one needs to find an article: author, title, date, publisher, etc. These can also be footnotes or endnotes that point to items in your bibliography.
Bibliography- A list of books and articles. At the end of the paper, this is sometimes called "References" or "Works Cited."