Plagiarism in Research Writing

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Recommended: Discuss the nature of plagiarism

Plagiarism comes about when a person uses words or ideas from another person’s work but fails to credit the source of the ideas or words. Scholarly work of any nature mainly requires the writing of dissertations, treatises or term papers in the world of academia. Students in institutions of higher learning, as part of the course work, carry out research and present their results in the form of dissertations or term papers. The assignments’ formatting usually follows standards namely the American Psychologists Association (APA) format or the Modern Language Association (MLA) format.

Plagiarism cannot not only be committed in writing research for academic purposes only, but can also be committed in areas of general writing such as in blogging or in song writing. A person who creates an idea or writes a work is the owner and originator of that work. This is the basic idea behind Copyright Laws. Copyright laws also cover such output as images and video clips. Reusing these ideas or words in one’s work without showing readers their source is tantamount to plagiarism.

Plagiarism can be committed in several ways. The writer may willfully commit this crime or may do so unintentionally. With the advent of the Internet, and the dissemination of copious amounts of information online, cases of plagiarism are now increasing. Computers have enabled lazy students, workers and even lecturers to copy information from web pages or electronic books. The danger here is that in some cases, they may reuse or incorporate chunks of information into their work without giving credit to the online reference source at all.

Cynthia Jones-Shoeman (2010) exposes one of the ways in which plagiarism can be committed whereby the writer (in thi...

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...Types of plagiarism. “Learning Center: Plagiarism Definitions, Tips on avoiding Plagiarism, Guidelines for Proper Citation, & Help Identifying Plagiarism”. Retrieved from http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_types_of_plagiarism.html

Plagiarism.org (n.d). What is plagiarism? “Learning Center: Plagiarism Definitions, Tips on avoiding Plagiarism, Guidelines for Proper Citation, & Help Identifying Plagiarism”. Retrieved from http://www.plagiarism.org/plag_article_what_is_plagiarism.html

Stolley, K. and Brizee, A. (2011-06-02). “Avoiding Plagiarism: Overview and Contradictions”. The Writing Lab, Purdue University. Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/01/

Stolley, K. and Brizee, A. (2010-04-21). “Avoiding Plagiarism: Is it Plagiarism Yet?”. The Writing Lab, Purdue University. Retrieved from http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/589/2/

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