Types Of Plagiarism

In simple words, plagiarism is the act of copying someone else’s work and taking the credit as one’s own original creation. The dictionary defines plagiarism as “the wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work”. Therefore, plagiarism is regarded as the infringement of scholarly ethics and intellectual property by most academicians. While academic and journalistic plagiarism has almost become outdated, the increasing technology of the internet is largely giving way for internet plagiarism. Due to this, plagiarism has taken many forms. While we consider plagiarism to be only word-to-word or cut, copy and paste, plagiarism has more types to add to its hat. Read on further to know the different kinds of plagiarism. Check them out.

 

 

This is a plagiarism type wherein a writer copies significant portions from a particular person’s work and uses them in his work, without making any changes at all. This can be concealed by noting relevant sentences from an author’s work and rephrasing them in order to fit together while retaining the original phraseology.

 

Even if you note down a particular paragraph from various sources and alter a few words here and there, the resulting product would still be considered plagiarism. Hence, if you intend to take down a sentence, make sure that you mention it in quotation marks and name the author and article to avoid duplication. However, use quotation marks only where the quotes are actually useful.

 

Rephrasing an article sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph would still be regarded as plagiarism. Here, although the writer is not copying the article word-by-word, the reasoning style is definitely being copied. While every author has his own distinct style of concept, ideas, thought and opinions, using them in your own article is considered as stealing or plagiarism.  

 

An author makes use of metaphors in his articles to help the readers comprehend his idea or to give a better description of the object or process. Furthermore, metaphors form a significant part of an author’s distinct style of creative writing. In such a case, the metaphors should be mentioned alongside the author’s name or you should come up with your own demonstrations.

 

Information that is accepted as general knowledge is not plagiarism. However, creative ideas or personal suggestions provided by an author that lead to the solution of a particular problem are his unique ideas and hence, not accepted as public domain. Thus, while using such ideas in an article, the author should be given a special mention.

 

Surprisingly, there are authors who do not steal the work of others, but redraft on their own. This is known as self-plagiarism, wherein people publish the same material through different mediums without referencing it correctly. Even though this is done unintentionally, it is still classed as plagiarism as the topics covered and the scenario stated are the same. A perfect example of self-plagiarism is the content available on various websites.