Worried about being accused of plagiarism

Recently I submitted a 2000 word summative report, and I’m due to receive my result in a few days. However, when I was reading it over again, I realised that I didn’t cite a statistic I used as brief extra info. (It has no impact on the overall report at all, and deleting it wouldn’t have made a difference.. I wish I did now though...) The only reason why I used the statistic was because it was in the lecture slides, but it wasn’t cited in comparison to the other information, so I assumed it was common knowledge. I’m only a first year, but this is my second report so I don’t know what’s going to happen now. In addition, when I submitted this report for formative assessment and feedback, my lecturers didn’t mention anything about it. Am I pretty much screwed, or just stressing way too much? I’d appreciate some thoughts.Tl;dr I didn’t cite a statistic and now worrying about getting in trouble.

Recently I submitted a 2000 word summative report, and I’m due to receive my result in a few days. However, when I was reading it over again, I realised that I didn’t cite a statistic I used as brief extra info. (It has no impact on the overall report at all, and deleting it wouldn’t have made a difference.. I wish I did now though...) The only reason why I used the statistic was because it was in the lecture slides, but it wasn’t cited in comparison to the other information, so I assumed it was common knowledge. I’m only a first year, but this is my second report so I don’t know what’s going to happen now. In addition, when I submitted this report for formative assessment and feedback, my lecturers didn’t mention anything about it. Am I pretty much screwed, or just stressing way too much? I’d appreciate some thoughts.Tl;dr I didn’t cite a statistic and now worrying about getting in trouble.

Recently I submitted a 2000 word summative report, and I’m due to receive my result in a few days. However, when I was reading it over again, I realised that I didn’t cite a statistic I used as brief extra info. (It has no impact on the overall report at all, and deleting it wouldn’t have made a difference.. I wish I did now though...) The only reason why I used the statistic was because it was in the lecture slides, but it wasn’t cited in comparison to the other information, so I assumed it was common knowledge. I’m only a first year, but this is my second report so I don’t know what’s going to happen now. In addition, when I submitted this report for formative assessment and feedback, my lecturers didn’t mention anything about it. Am I pretty much screwed, or just stressing way too much? I’d appreciate some thoughts.Tl;dr I didn’t cite a statistic and now worrying about getting in trouble.

However, for you to be investigated for plagiarism, you need around 20/30%+ to flag up.

OP has nothing to worry about, but this is completely untrue. I've flagged some with as little as 8% for academic misconduct. percentage amounts are only part of the story - you can get 20 and 30% perfectly legitimately with full citations.

Neither of us can know that he has nothing to worry about - only the plagiarism report will know that.


With regards to your second point: all fields are different. It is unclear what field you or the OP is in, so each field will have their own academic rules regarding what constitutes plagiarism. For instance, computing essays, can have 20/30/40%+ of unquoted work before it's flagged up as something that needs looking into. Other fields that may differ, but generally, 8% is very unlikely to get you flagged, or reported, for plagiarism.

The report is a tool, sometimes you need it and pay attention, other times you do not. You can break plagiarism rules without flagging anything at all on TurnItIn, so saying 'you need 20 or 30% to be flagged' and thus punished is a demonstrable nonsense

I failed a 0% similarity submission only days ago for being almost completely paraphrased and yet completely uncited

Neither of us can know that he has nothing to worry about - only the plagiarism report will know that.


With regards to your second point: all fields are different. It is unclear what field you or the OP is in, so each field will have their own academic rules regarding what constitutes plagiarism. For instance, computing essays, can have 20/30/40%+ of unquoted work before it's flagged up as something that needs looking into. Other fields that may differ, but generally, 8% is very unlikely to get you flagged, or reported, for plagiarism.

Note: so we are on the same page, here, I am discussing the automated detection of plagiarism, not the manual detection - which is entirely different. We may be perceiving the detection of plagiarism through different systems.

What do you teach?