Academic Integrity Resources
Practical Resources for Academic Integrity and Responsible Authorship
These resources explain responsible authorship, attribution, research accuracy, and the careful use of tools in academic work. They are for understanding the ideas. They are not a set of accusations, and they are not ClarityScholar’s service rules.
Guide
Start with the guide to responsible AI use in academic writing.
Authorship
Authorship means the work represents the writer’s genuine intellectual contribution: the reasoning, the decisions, and the analysis the task asked for. On assessed work, that reasoning stays the student’s. On a research paper, who counts as an author may also follow institutional or publication standards. This page does not set one journal’s authorship criteria. Help that the rules allow can include feedback, editing, proofreading, a clarification, or guidance on formatting. It should not become someone else completing the assessed work, a hidden replacement of the student’s reasoning, or a contribution that was not made. Editing and proofreading can improve a draft that already exists. They should not become ghostwriting.
Editing vs Proofreading explains those two passes. Neither one replaces the author.
Attribution and sources
When ideas, words, data or evidence come from a source, the relevant rules may require attribution. Citation conventions differ, and this page does not teach a citation style. A citation does not make a fabricated source real, an unreliable source strong, copied reasoning original, or unsupported evidence valid. Integrity covers both credit and the accurate use of evidence. Do not invent authors, papers, journal titles, years, DOIs, quotations, or page numbers. That applies whether the invention came from memory, an AI tool, a citation generator, or drafting by hand. AI systems can produce references that do not exist, that have the wrong details, or that combine several sources incorrectly. Check a generated reference against the original or an authoritative record before you use it. A paraphrase should restate the idea in your own wording and structure, keep the meaning, and keep the attribution where it is required. It is not a way to disguise copied work, and it is not a way to evade a detector. A direct quotation should reproduce the source accurately and follow the quotation rules you were given. Do not invent a quotation or change what it means. Detailed style rules belong with the citation guides. A correctly formatted citation also does not mean the source is good evidence. Relevance, credibility, recency where it matters, method, and context are separate questions. This page is not a full source-evaluation article.
Citation checking checklist is a final pass for matching citations, references and source details in a document you already have. It does not verify every source for you.
Research accuracy
Findings should reflect the data, the analysis, the observations, and the records that exist. Do not invent results, change an inconvenient finding, manufacture sample responses, or report an analysis that was not performed. A dissertation or paper should describe the method that was actually used. Do not say that interviews happened, that data were collected, or that a method was followed, if they were not. That is a reporting question, not a wording question. Do not invent ethics approval, an approval number, consent, or an institutional permission that was not given. This hub does not grant ethics approval. The same care applies to novelty. Do not write that no one has studied the question, or that a project is the first, unless the sources you have actually support that claim. For publication, do not say that a revision was made, that an analysis was run, or that a reviewer concern was addressed, if that work was not done.
How to identify a research gap explains how a gap follows from what the sources show. It does not certify that a study is new.
AI and other tools
Institutions, courses, assessments, journals and research settings do not all treat AI tools the same way. The first question is what the relevant policy allows, not whether a tool can produce the text. Where use is permitted, a careful approach is to check those rules, not to misrepresent who did the thinking, to verify factual and source claims, to disclose use where disclosure is required, to read the output critically, not to fabricate citations or data, and to keep the reasoning that the task requires from you. This page only introduces that. It is not the full guide. Academic integrity is not a project of tuning sentences so that a detector scores them differently. This page does not describe evasion, humanisation, score reduction, or ways to hide tool use. An automated detection result should not be treated, on the strength of this page, as proof of who wrote a text. No detector is named here, and no accuracy rate is claimed. Using a tool does not move responsibility off the author. The writer still checks accuracy, citations, the rules that apply, and the version that is submitted.
AI content review is a human review of an existing document for voice, clarity, unsupported or generic claims, citation concerns, and factual-risk flags. It does not evade a detector, certify authorship, or guarantee that a text is AI-free.
Rules, collaboration and assessed work
What collaboration is allowed depends on the task. A group assignment may permit joint work that an individual assessment does not. A research collaboration may attribute contributions differently again. Follow the instructions for that task. This page does not invent one collaboration rule for every setting. On assessed coursework, the thinking the assignment asks for stays the student’s. Support may help the student interpret feedback, revise writing that already exists, clarify structure, or check whether instructions were followed. It does not complete the assessment. Where the rules require it, disclosure can cover AI use, collaboration, other assistance, and conflicts. Before you treat a general explanation as permission, read the current assignment brief, the course policy, the university academic-integrity policy, the research-ethics requirements, and the journal or publisher guidance that applies. These resources do not override those documents. Application documents should stay truthful as well. A personal statement, a statement of purpose, a CV or a resume should not invent a credential, a job, a publication, a hardship, a research experience, or a relationship with a faculty member. That is a separate kind of document, and this page is not a career guide.
Coursework support is guidance on assessed work the student is writing. It does not complete the assignment.
A short self-check
Before you submit, ask whether the core work is genuinely yours where the task requires that, whether the sources are real, whether quotations are accurate, whether attribution is present where it is required, whether data and findings are reported as they were, whether you followed the AI and collaboration rules that actually apply, whether you disclosed assistance where that was required, whether credentials and experiences are truthful, and whether the submitted work represents what you did. These questions stay on this page. They are not a separate checklist. Signs worth a second look include a fabricated citation, invented data, an invented ethics approval, copied or paraphrased material without the attribution the rules require, someone else quietly supplying the reasoning, an AI-generated claim accepted without checking, a false credential or research experience, and an analysis reported although it was never performed. Where the rules allow it, responsible support can look like feedback, review, proofreading, editing, a check that questions and methods line up, a citation or formatting review, or guidance on presentation. The point of that support is to help the writer improve work that remains theirs. Phrases such as “100% original”, “plagiarism-free”, and “AI-free” are not guarantees this page will make. Integrity here means truthful authorship, truthful source use, and truthful research practice.
Read the academic integrity policy for ClarityScholar’s own service boundaries. This hub explains the ideas. That page states what the service will and will not do.
The policy is separate from these guides
For ClarityScholar’s own service boundaries, read the Academic Integrity policy. The Free Assessment page shows whether an online request can be submitted yet. These pages do not ask you to upload a document, and they do not review a draft here.