Cutting and pasting information you have found on the Web into your paper without properly using quotation marks or citing the source is plagiarism. Using someone else's information as your own is stealing.

You can buy research papers on the Web. You may argue, "I paid for it — don't I own it?" Though you can buy someone else's ideas legally, you cannot then claim that they are your own. If a friend or classsmate gives you a paper to hand in to your instructor, and they submitted the same paper for another class, that's plagiarism too. It's very likely that you could get that person in trouble by passing his or her paper off as your own work.

Some instructors use Google to check students' research papers.

Four UH campuses now subscribe to Turnitin.com, a Web site that verifies what you have written has been submitted to other instructors.

"Used by thousands of institutions in over eighty countries, Turnitin’s comprehensive plagiarism prevention system lets you quickly and effectively check all of your students’ work in a fraction of the time necessary to scan a few suspect papers using a search engine.

Every paper submitted is returned in the form of a customized Originality Report. Results are based on exhaustive searches of billions of pages from both current and archived instances of the internet, millions of student papers previously submitted to Turnitin, and commercial databases of journal articles and periodicals.

Any matches uncovered between submitted papers and source material is detailed in an intuitive and unambiguous format, allowing educators to spend time addressing plagiarism's causes rather than searching for it.

Turnitin's plagiarism prevention is often so successful that institutions using our system on a large scale see measurable rates of plagiarism drop to almost zero."

John Barrie, president of iParadigmsLCC and Turnitin, was quoted in a recent article: "Buyers (of Internet term papers) beware. Think of the ethics of the people you are dealing with (people who sell research papers over the Internet). If they're so unethical as to sell you a paper for class, they may be so unethical as to plagiarize the paper that they sell to you." This quote is contained in the following article from EBSCOHost's Academic Search Premier database.

Follow this link to view the full article.

Internet term paper sellers have likely stolen or obtained the papers they're selling illegally or unethically.

Over the course of a semester, your instructor has collected several writing samples from you. When it's time to write and turn in your research paper, s/he already knows how you write and how you think. If you turn in a paper that doesn't sound like your work, it will be very obvious to your instructor.

It's simply not worth the risk.