Plagiarism in Academic Projects: Things to Consider

In academic writing, plagiarism is drawing another author’s idea or language without proper crediting the primary source in your paper.

Whether the source is a book written by a known writer, project of another student, any web-based resource without clear authorship, or essay writing service, taking credit for another person’s work is considered stealing, which is inadmissible in the academic world.

Nowadays, getting any information from the Web-based resources has become very easy. However, for this reason, when you use such sources, you have to be especially careful about keeping track of the sources where you gather information and ideas, and about providing proper references to these sources. You may end up taking credit for somebody else’s ideas, even if you do not want to, by cutting and pasting from an online source into your notes and forgetting to label that source in your notes clearly.

You have to keep in mind that each Web site is a document with a certain author, meaning that every single Web resource has to be cited correctly in your project. For example, while it may seem obvious to you that an idea drawn from a concrete book by a particular author can only be included in your paper if you provide a proper citation, it might be less clear that the information taken from certain Encyclopedia Web site requires a similar citation. Even though the authorship of such an article might be less evident than it would probably be if it were a print article, you are still responsible for properly citing this material. In the same way, if you use the content from the Web resource without any clear authorship, you are still responsible for citing correctly. Simply put, whatever source you use, it always requires a proper reference, even if the author of the source is not linked to it.

While it may seem obvious that copying another author’s thoughts verbatim and submitting those ideas in the project with your name on it is plagiarism, other types of plagiarism might be not as evident. Among such forms of plagiarism, there are mosaic plagiarism, inadequate paraphrasing, uncited paraphrase, uncited quotation, and using material from another student’s work. Factually, these forms of plagiarism are even more spread, so you have to ensure you understand each of them, and how to avoid them in your project.