Health Science Academic Skills: Plagiarism, Referencing and APA Style

This essay explores the crucial academic skills required in health science, emphasizing the importance of avoiding plagiarism through proper referencing. It highlights that health science, encompassing fields like biology, nursing, and psychology, demands rigorous academic writing. Plagiarism, defined as copying or borrowing others' ideas without attribution, poses ethical concerns. The essay underscores the necessity of unique sentence construction and proper citation when incorporating external ideas. Referencing, particularly in APA style, involves comprehensively citing authors and sources. APA style includes listing all authors within the text and providing full references at the end. The essay concludes that mastering un-plagiarized work and accurate citation is vital for health science students, especially those pursuing research careers, where originality and precise attribution are paramount.

Running head: ACADEMIC SKILLS FOR HEALTH SCIENCE
Academic Skills for Health Science
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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ACADEMIC SKILLS FOR HEALTH SCIENCE
Academic skills in Health Science
Health Science encompasses numerous subjects like biology, nursing, psychology and
other application based biological sciences. All these branch of Health Science demands
periodic completion of assignments, essays, reports and dissertations based on certain critical
topics. One of the prime factors that must be taken into consideration while doing the
academic writing for the Health Science subjects is plagiarism (Canagarajah, 2013).
According to Hirvela and Du (2013) plagiarism means copying other works or borrowing
someone else’s original data and claiming it as self-idea. But this act of copying or burrowing
can disguise potential threats of offence in the ethical domains. Hence the main academic
skill that must be executed by a health science student is procuring un-plagiarised
assignment. Writing un-plagiarised assignment in academic writing means one can use
other’s idea while answering certain questions but the sentence constructions must be unique
and not copy-pasted. Here comes the importance of the concept of referencing. Referencing
means while using other’s idea or concept, it is the duty of the writer to comprehensively site
the name of author along with the journal from where the original idea was extracted and then
subsequently implemented (American Psychological Association, 2012). This referencing can
be done in various ways and one of the important referencing styles is APA (American
Psychological Association) style referencing. APA style referencing mainly follows use of all
the name of the authors (up to 5 authors maximum) in within text referencing and then citing
the whole reference including the name of the paper, journal and year of publication under
the reference list at the end of the assignment (American Psychological Association, 2012).
This concept of employing un-plagiarised work and proper citation of the data is
crucial for the students of the Health Science in the long run, especially for those who are
aspiring to make their future career as research scholars. While doing research for PhD, it is
the duty of a author to conduct a research on a unique topic which is un-plagiarised and has

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ACADEMIC SKILLS FOR HEALTH SCIENCE
exact citation of the previous research from where the idea of the future progress in work is
being extracted (Hirvela & Du, 2013).

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ACADEMIC SKILLS FOR HEALTH SCIENCE
References (APA style)
American Psychological Association. (2012). APA style guide to electronic references.
American Psychological Association, Washington DC.
Canagarajah, A. S. (2013). Critical academic writing and multilingual students. University of
Michigan Press.
Hirvela, A., & Du, Q. (2013). “Why am I paraphrasing?”: Undergraduate ESL writers'
engagement with source-based academic writing and reading. Journal of English for
Academic Purposes, 12(2), 87-98.