Can you define the word “plagiarism”? This question might pinch the minds of many online users particularly high school students and novice authors. It’s unfortunate but many online users consider plagiarism as another name of copy and paste. However, plagiarism is not simply copy and pasting but its sealing the work that belongs to someone else and pretending if you are the creator of this artwork, book, design or research paper. It could be anything from copying your friend’s assignment to stealing contents from an online journal and using that material in without giving the credit to the original author.
Plagiarism is the hottest topic of online community and over the last few days many high profile plagiarism cases have been confronted for plagiarism. Since our childhood, we have been told that theft is both against moral values and the law. So now how we can allow ourselves or other mature people to steal someone else work and claim it our property.
Reasons of Plagiarism:
There are many excuses behind plagiarism; sometimes it can be intentional plagiarism or sometime its accidental plagiarism. Many people knowingly copy material from another student’s journal, an author’s book, from an online research paper or sometimes it happens when you seek the help of a friend or relative and in the spirit of friendship they opt to go for plagiarism.
Fortuitous plagiarism occurs when you don’t know that copying another persona’s work is not permitted by law, or when you express another person’s idea in your own words or when you copy notes, paragraphs, and designs from other sources but forget to credit the proper citation or reference of the original source.
Some other reasons for plagiarism are:
- You don’t have sufficient knowledge to write.
- You think your readers will not notice your plagiarism.
- Or you think your readers will not care.
Types of Plagiarism:
Any portion no matter it’s a small chunk from a book, journal, and an idea of another person or a design such as a logo or website design copied without the proper consent or reference is falls into the categories of plagiarism. The type of plagiarism depends on the ratio of stolen content such as Minimal Plagiarism, Substantial Plagiarism and Complete plagiarism.
Consequences of Plagiarism:
These days plagiarism is considered a serious crime and may result into various charges and penalties. A student will get 0 marks, will be warned, suspended or rusticated. While professional level plagiarism may cause a ban on the author, web site or blog, removal of plagiarized material from internet, a search engine rank drop or any other sanctions or formal charges.
Advice:
Plagiarism may give you a grade push at start but at higher level of your profession or academic career, you have to show the evidences for your ideas and facts.
The guidance for victim of accidental plagiarism is that these days many PlagiarismChecker software have been introduced and available for use on the internet. A plagiarism checker helps you to check your work for any unintentional plagiarism and take the right action at the right time to avoid any future problems.
Do you think that someone is stealing your script and it is being been trampled by plagiarizers or do you want to verify you own work for plagiarism? Do use a plagiarism software tool. You can get free and paid versions of plagiarism checker software here.