Despite the importance of research integrity and the serious consequences of plagiarism, research recently conducted by Libertas shows that many researchers have a weak understanding of plagiarism.  We’ve therefore prepared this short introduction to plagiarism.  If, after reading this introduction, readers have further questions about plagiarism we encourage you to visit the website we link to at the end.

What is it?

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, plagiarism can be:

1. Stealing and passing off another person’s ideas or words as one’s own

2. Using another person’s production without crediting the source

3. Presenting an idea as new or original that is derived from an existing source.

There are two acts required to plagiarize, firstly, taking another person’s work and secondly, making other people believe that it is your own work.

Any idea that is derived directly from the work of another is not original. Using another person’s ideas constitutes theft of intellectual property as well as plagiarism. Ideas arising from wide reading literature without one single piece of work forming its basis are original and do not need to be referenced. Any work or ideas borrowed, used, copied, or discussed need to be referenced to avoid plagiarism.

Another person’s work can be used provided the original author is credited with the original idea. A lack of acknowledgement is considered an attempt to make others believe the idea is an original creation. To avoid plagiarizing, researchers should reference any work they read and subsequently used in any part of their research, no matter how small or insignificant they may think it was.

Examples of Plagiarism

There are many different types of plagiarism where the original source is not cited, such as:

• Submitting an exact copy of another author’s work as one’s own

• Copying whole paragraphs of work without citing

• Copying small paragraphs from several sources and fitting them together

• Copying large paragraphs, or the entire source and modifying all the keywords

• Changing a large number of sentences to disguise the fact that the ideas are not original

• Using largely one’s own pervious work, thereby violating institutional policies on production of original work

Plagiarism can also occur when the source is cited, like in cases of:

• Referencing the author, but not the title of the work

• Providing incorrect information about the source, thus making it impossible to find

• Failing to add quotation marks to word-for-word references

• Collecting many sources, but failing to include any original work

• Citing material from a source, but later using the same source without citing again

Self-plagiarism

There are other instances of plagiarism; one frequently occurring example being self-plagiarism. In cases of self-plagiarism, the author uses a piece of their previous work and re-uses it in their current work without referencing it. While this does not attempt to pass off another’s work as one’s own, if the original work had collaborators, the use of it in later work would be plagiarizing their contribution.

Self-plagiarism also occurs when readers are misled into believing that an author did not use previous work (even if it was solely their own) when preparing their current work. This is plagiarism even if both papers have no co-authors. Readers must be informed of any work or ideas not originating from the current research even if they are the author’s own.

How to avoid plagiarism

All types of plagiarism can be purposeful or accidental where authors chose to omit sources or simply lose track of which parts of the article are their own. An easy way to prevent accidental plagiarism is to use referencing software such as Mendeley or Connotea. This software allows authors to build bibliographies as they write thus keeping sources organized.

The simplest way to avoid plagiarism is to cite all sources used, even if they were only used briefly, or used in part. If an author acknowledges the original source and informs the reader how to find it, this is usually enough to avoid constituting plagiarism. Quotes, paraphrases, ideas, references, and other important sources all need to be cited to avoid plagiarism.

Citing reflects well on the author because it demonstrates to readers that the work was properly investigated. An author’s own work needs to be cited so readers can see where the knowledge originated and are not led to believe that the current research gave rise to all the author’s ideas.

To avoid plagiarism, authors should be aware that words or ideas taken from somewhere else, interview information, exact phrases, diagrams, and directly used audio and visual information must have citations.

An author’s personal experiences and observations, results from experiments, original artwork, generally accepted facts that were not the result of a single experiment and common knowledge do not need citations.

Learn more about plagiarism at plagiarism.org

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