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Plagiarism, simply put, is presenting someone else’s words, work, or creative products (images, music, etc.) as your own without properly acknowledging them. In academia, it is treated as an ethical breach and a form of intellectual theft. Notice here that the definition of plagiarism doesn’t include “intent”. In other words, plagiarism is plagiarism, whether you intended to copy someone else’s work or it happened just by accident.
Types of Plagiarism
What are the consequences of plagiarism in academia?
How to Avoid Plagiarism
Types of Plagiarism
- Direct Plagiarism
This is what every kid is warned about in Grade 1: it’s wrong to copy someone else’s work as if you’ve done it yourself. For example, the historian Doris Goodwin was accused of lifting many passages in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys from other biographies and works.
- Indirect Plagiarism/Paraphrasing Plagiarism
Indirect plagiarism or paraphrasing plagiarism involves using someone else’s ideas or thoughts but “clothing” them in your own words and not acknowledging them. In academia, this happens mostly when you don’t include proper citations.
Example
Original text (by Larsson & Nguyen, 2020): Our findings show that cardiovascular disease risk is elevated in patients with a previous history of kenrickomycin use.
Your text: Kenrickomycin use can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. [no citation]
- Self Plagiarism
Did you know that taking sections of text or even ideas from your own previous work is also considered plagiarism? Self plagiarism is unethical in academia because you are misleading others about how novel or original the content is. Also, if your previous work is already published, self plagiarism can involve copyright violations.
- Mosaic Plagiarism
As the name implies, mosaic plagiarism involves snipping bits and pieces from multiple previous works and then combining them together to look like original content. Again, there’s no proper citation or attribution to these previous works. Mosaic plagiarism is harder to detect because there’s a mix of original and copied text, but experts familiar with the field or topic are likely to spot it.
- Accidental Plagiarism
This occurs when authors genuinely believe they are producing original text but have unintentionally duplicated existing work. It’s just as serious as the other types of plagiarism listed above, because it’s hard to prove your innocence.
What are the consequences of plagiarism in academia?
If plagiarism is detected in your work, the consequences include failing the assignment, failing the course, suspension or expulsion if you are a student. If you are a researcher, you could lose your funding and employment, be sued, and lose your reputation, and even your other work will lose credibility.
How to Avoid Plagiarism
- Do Your Own Work
Write your essays, articles, or reports yourself. Don’t outsource them to a paid third party service and copy their output blindly.
- Give Your Opinion
Don’t lift ideas from another work even if you’re adding a citation. Discuss other authors’ works in your own words, giving your own opinions and insights.
Example: Chaiyaporn and Kauri (2015) showed a link between preconception Vitamin D intake and gestational diabetes after controlling for maternal obesity, but their sample did not include women with a history of Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes.
- Indicate Quotes Correctly
Sometimes you need to refer to a previous source word-for-word. In that case, do what humanities and arts researchers do: indicate quotations with quotation marks or format them as block quotations, with a proper citation and reference.
Example: The WHO has described the current amphitextitis epidemic as “a global concern of unparalleled severity” (WHO, 2050).
- Manage Citations Properly
Use an online citation management tool to keep track of what papers you are reading for what project, so that you don’t forget to reference them when you use their ideas or insights.
- Use AI Carefully
It can be tempting to outsource much or all of your writing to a free large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT. But AI output may not be 100% free of plagiarism, as such tools are basically text predictors: they come up with words or combinations of words on the basis of their analyses of large training datasets.
- Run Your Own Plagiarism Check
Whether you’re submitting an essay, thesis, or research paper, it’s a good idea to run your own plagiarism check to guard against accidental plagiarism. You can use a free academic writing assistant like Paperpal or opt for a paid service like iThenticate.
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