Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Plagiarism comes in several forms:
◾
Copying work produced by someone else word for word and pre-
senting it as your own.
◾
Inserting portions of someone else's work into your own and
claiming full credit
◾
Changing a few words and phrases of a piece of work so it looks
different but is based on someone else's work
◾
Taking material from multiple sources and putting it all together as
your own work
Plagiarism has become a big problem in colleges and universities. Often,
when students receive assignments, they simply research on the Internet,
copy large blocks of text from various sources, stitch them together into
a single document, and pass the result off as their own work. Even worse,
some students patronize any one of several Internet-based companies
that write assignments for them.
Using Citations
It is not always wrong to use someone else's work. In many cases, you
can quote or paraphrase (discussed next) someone else's work in your
own piece—provided you include a reference to the source (in other
words, to the author and name of the work). This is called a
citation
.
Including a citation to give credit to the original author of a piece of
work is the only way to avoid plagiarism.
citation
A reference to a source—that is, to the
author and name of a published or unpublished
work—following a quotation from said source.
Paraphrasing
In addition to quoting an author directly, you can paraphrase what he or
she writes. When you
paraphrase
, you use different words to convey the
same idea. Even so, you still must include a citation to acknowledge that
the original idea came from someone else.
paraphrase
To use different words to convey the
same idea.
Combating Plagiarism
Recent years have seen the development of a range of anti-plagiarism software products, such as turnitin (
www.
turnitin.com
). These programs compare a submitted document against a large database of quotes and texts.
Mathematical processes check not only for actual word-for-word plagiarism, but also for paraphrased text where it can
identify the original source. The results then highlight any suspect or copied areas in text and state where citations
should be applied.
Using software like this, it takes only a few seconds to examine a document. Some educational institutions use this
type of software as standard practice for all work handed in by students. Students can also use this type of software
before turning in an assignment to ensure they have not inadvertently plagiarized.
