Simply stated, plagiarism is the dishonest use of someone else's thoughts or words. It's cheating. Plagiarism can vary from submitting someone else's paper as your own, to "borrowing" a nice sounding phrase, to using a source without citing it correctly, to "padding" a bibliography by making up sources or including sources you didn't use in your research. Whenever you use a general concept or idea, quotation, statistic, fact, illustration, or phrase that is not your own without giving proper credit to the author, you are guilty of plagiarism.