Unit 5: Citation and Academic Integrity
5.1 Why Cite?
- Credit — the intellectual honesty (the plagiarism’s bar).
- Verification — the reader’s trail to the source.
- Authority — the claim’s weight (the SC’s judgment beats the blogger’s view).
- The discipline’s record — the research’s proof (the examiner’s first check).
5.2 The Citation Basics
The legal citation’s core elements (any consistent style accepted — the convener’s guide controls):
- Cases: the party names (italicised in print), the year, the court, the citation — the Nepali form: Party v. Party, NKP year, No., D.No., page (the syllabus’s own case lists are the model).
- Statutes: the short title and year — the Consumer Protection Act 2075 (2018); the section on first use (the Interpretation course’s caution on section numbers).
- Books: the author, the title, the edition, the year (the page).
- Articles: the author, the title, the journal’s volume, the year, the page.
- Web sources: the author/organisation, the title, the site, the date, the URL and the access date — the unstable source’s caution.
- Quotations: the short quotes in the text with quotation marks; the long quotes indented; the verbatim discipline (the alteration marked with brackets); the Nepali passages translated (the translation noted).
5.3 Footnotes vs In-Text Citations
The law faculty’s convention: footnotes (the citation’s home at the page’s foot; the text’s flow preserved; the Ibid./above-note short forms). The in-text style (author-year) is the social-science import — acceptable if consistent. The examiner’s rule: consistency is the courtesy.
5.4 Plagiarism and its Boundaries
- The definition: the others’ words-or-ideas presented as one’s own — the theft of both the sentence and the thought.
- The grey zones: the close paraphrase (the source’s structure followed with synonyms — still plagiarism); the patchwork paper; the self-plagiarism (the own earlier work’s reuse without note); the AI-assisted drafting’s new questions (the institution’s policies — the disclosure’s duty).
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