It is crucial that university students acquire knowledge about the norms of academic discourse, including typologies, semantic, syntactic, pragmatic rules, and technical disciplinary language. These skills enable them to communicate effectively in the contexts of scientific knowledge dissemination. The objective of this research was to establish the relationship between writing norms (citations and references) and the phenomenon of academic plagiarism. To achieve this purpose, a method-ology that combined discourse analysis with analytic-synthetic theoretical and empirical observa-tional approaches was employed. The sample consisted of 12 undergraduate papers belonging to the Law program of the DTGS University, selected by means of intentional selection techniques. The data collection instrument used was a content matrix that was organized into six evaluation criteria: total number of citations, correct recording of citations within the text, inclusion of refer-ences of self-cited authors in the text, bibliographic updating (valid for five years), direct citation (literal text) and indirect citation (paraphrasing). Content analysis was used to interpret the data obtained. The results revealed that most of the texts analyzed did not comply with the correct rules of citation and referencing. This finding is explained by the existing deficiencies in the management of the conventions of academic discourse.