What is Plagiarism?
Etymology of the word “plagiarism”
In the 1st century, the use of the Latin word plagiarius (literally kidnapper), to denote someone stealing someone else’s work,
What is Plagiarism?
Etymology of the word “plagiarism”
In the 1st century, the use of the Latin word plagiarius (literally kidnapper), to denote someone stealing someone else’s work, was pioneered by Roman poet Martial, who complained that another poet had “kidnapped his verses.” This use of the word was introduced into English in 1601 by dramatist Ben Jonson, to describe as a plagiary someone guilty of literary theft.
The derived form plagiarism was introduced into English around 1620.
According to the Merriam-Webster On-Line Dictionary, to “plagiarize” means
1. To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
2. To use (another’s production) without crediting the source
Stanford sees plagiarism as “use, without giving reasonable and appropriate credit to or acknowledging the author or source, of another person’s original work, whether such work is made up of code, formulas, ideas, language, research, strategies, writing or other form”
The practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own is plagiarism.
So what is plagiarism?
1. Plagiarism can occur on any academic assignment, not just papers.
2. Plagiarism is not limited to copying other peoples’ work, but includes failing to cite your sources properly or revising others’ work to make it sound like your own.
3. If you don’t use quotation marks correctly, you are plagiarizing! If you don’t use footnotes correctly, you are plagiarizing! If you copy someone else’s work and try to mask it by changing words or sentences around, you are plagiarizing!
According to U.S. law, the answer is yes. In the United States and many other countries, the expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property, and is protected by copyright laws, just like original inventions. Almost all forms of expression fall under copyright protection as long as they are recorded in some media (such as a book or a computer file).
All of the following are considered plagiarism
TYPES OF PLAGIARISM
Submitting another’s work, word-for-word, as one’s own
Contains significant portions of text from a single source without alterations
3. FIND – REPLACE
Changing key words and phrases but retaining the essential content of the source
Paraphrases from multiple sources, made to fit together
Borrows generously from the writer’s previous work without citation
Combines perfectly cited sources with copied passages without citation
Mixes copied material from multiple sources
8. 404 ERROR
Includes citations to non-existent or inaccurate information about sources
Includes proper citation to sources but the paper contains almost no original work
Includes proper citation, but relies too closely on the text’s original wording and/or structure
Reading the following line, can you guess the meaning of the term self-plagiarism.
“Self-plagiarism involves dishonesty but not intellectual theft.“ (David B. Resnik)
Self-plagiarism (also known as “recycling fraud”) is the reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one’s own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or without citing the original work. It is common for university researchers to rephrase and republish their own work, tailoring it for different academic journals and newspaper articles, to disseminate their work to the widest possible interested public. One of the functions of the process of peer review in academic writing is to prevent this type of “recycling”.
CRITICISM ON SELF-PLAGIARISM
The concept of “self-plagiarism” has been challenged as self-contradictory. Stephanie J. Bird argues that self-plagiarism is a misnomer, since by definition plagiarism concerns the use of others’ material. Bird identifies that in an educational context, “self-plagiarism” refers to the case of a student who resubmits “the same essay for credit in two different courses.”
HEC’s Plagiarism Eradication System
HEC’s goal is to combat plagiarism effectively in an academic environment in all institutions while ensuring that the students and academicians know that stealing someone’s intellectual property is unethical and can lead to serious consequences. For this, IT division has sought for technological solution and acquired an online software tool to assist in identifying the plagiarized material from documents. The software tool, iThenticate and Turnitin are amongst the leading software used globally for such purposes. The facility is provided to all higher education institutions across the country and is in use since 2007. This web based service is available at http://www.turnitin.com and 1000 licenses for each of the universities/ institutes have been acquired and handed over to teaching faculty, post graduate students and researchers in order to address the issue at the grass root level. A total of one hundred and twenty seven (127) HEIs have been provided with this facility. At present there are 7170 instructors registered with this acquired services, whereas the number of students are more than 15,000. During past five (05) years, nearly 150,0