Using information ethically means three things: giving credit through citation, respecting copyright, and acting with academic integrity. In short, it’s treating others’ ideas with the same honesty you’d want shown to your own.

You’ve found good information and judged it well. There’s one step left, and it’s the one that protects both your readers and you: using that information honestly.

It comes down to a simple courtesy — the same one you’d expect if the work were yours. When you build on someone else’s ideas or words, you say so.

The big one: plagiarism (and how easy it is to do by accident)

Plagiarism is presenting someone else’s words or ideas as your own. People imagine it as deliberate cheating, but far more often it happens by accident — a sentence copied into your notes “just for now”, then forgotten and folded into your essay as if it were yours. The fix is the same either way: cite where it came from.

Notice the honest version isn’t just a few words swapped around — it’s genuinely re-expressed, in your own voice, with the source named. That’s the standard to aim for.

Two more habits

• Respect copyright and licences. Not everything online is free to reuse. An open licence like Creative Commons tells you what you may do.
• Be honest about uncertainty. “The evidence suggests” is more truthful — and more credible — than pretending to a certainty you don’t have.

That’s the whole cycle: you spotted a need, found information, weighed it, and used it with care. You now have the backbone of information literacy — everything else in your studies builds on it. When you’re ready, take a look at the Course Wrap-up, and well done for getting here.

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.