Chapter Fourteen Objectives

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In this final chapter we help you steer clear of plagiarism, which is the use of others’ words and ideas without proper attribution, find resources to help you with your research, and provide an assignment that puts in place the components necessary for finishing your research project.

Plagiarism is a violation of scholarly integrity and hurts not just the plagiarist (who gets caught) and the source of the information (who is uncredited), but also the knowledge profession itself, which depends on an unbroken chain of attribution so that other researchers can follow the scholarly conversation back to their sources. In our page on plagiarism, we provide advice for how to credit your sources and avoid plagiarism.

Researchers need lots of resources, including training, sources, time, funding, publishing venues, to do their work. In our page on additional resources, we provide information about many valuable resources, such as UCF’s University Writing Center, Information Literacy Modules, Research Tips Thursdays, Undergraduate Research Opportunities, Showcase of Undergraduate Research, The Pegasus Review, UCF Funding Opportunities, and Publishing and Conferences.

Finally, we provide a Foundational Materials assignment in which you put in place the components necessary to complete your research project. These components include a title, research question, thesis statement, abstract, and annotated list of sources.