Academic Plagiarism Research Paper

Academic Plagiarism

Plagiarism:

Oxford dictionary in its website defines plagiarism as

“Noun: The practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.”1

Plagiarism in general is considered as theft of intellectual property. And theft of one’s academic work may it be a research, a thesis, a work of fiction, a journal, an article an assignment or even a single line is considered as Academic Plagiarism.

UCM student handbook states Plagiarism as “ Plagiarism is defined as the borrowing of ideas, opinions, examples, key words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or even structure from another person 's work, including work written or produced by others without proper acknowledgment.”2

Major forms of Academic Plagiarism

By pure coincidence , the concepts of the academic work may be identical to works of other authors, or proper acknowledgement of the used concepts is not given due to mistakes in citations, quotations and references of the used concepts and their users .Even though there was no intentional plagiarism, it will be marked as academic plagiarism by rule. Such cases come under accidental plagiarism.

Scenarios of academic plagiarism

Academic plagiarism occurs predominantly in Educational institutions. Many of the

Students, and on occasion few of the teachers tend to “borrow” information and use them without proper Citation and reference. The writing centre of university of central Missouri in the paper plagiarising vs paraphrasing defined few scenarios of plagiarism.4

For Example: Software engineering may be defined as the systematic design and development of software products and the management of the software pro-cess.

1. Changing only minor words in quotation is plagiarism

Software Engineering is the systematic design and development of software projects as well as management of the software

Self-check: After completing the final draft it is better to check (proof read) the entire document with a plagiarism checker before submitting it. At this point it is important if all the citations have been referred at the end in the bibliography or references column. It would avoid any accidental plagiarism that may occur.

Things learnt from this research:

The research has not only reviewed the well-known concepts of academic plagiarism but also introduced new facts and forced to think of academic plagiarism in different light. A new thing learnt in this research is that plagiarism can occur intentionally and unintentionally. It may not be an intention to plagiarize but it will be marked as academic plagiarism if proper citations, quotations and references are not given. So understanding and learning how to cite and quote the references is significant.

Most students do not realize the extent of the damage that plagiarism causes on their own intellectual growth. While working on one’s own idea, it would push their limits and compel them to think out of the box. This may not show an immediate result but it would certainly strengthen their intellectual abilities to a greater degree.