Plagiarism is the reproduction or appropriation of someone else’s work without proper attribution; passing off as one’s own the work of someone else. Self-Plagiarism is copying material you have previously produced and passing it off as a new production. This can potentially violate copyright protection, if the work has been published, and is banned by most academic policies.
Plagiarism on research papers can be of different types which includes:
- Downloading a free research paper : Many of these papers have been written and shared by others. Free papers are often of poor quality, in both mechanics and content. Some of the papers are surprisingly old (with citations being no more recent than the seventies).
- Buying a paper from commercial sites: These papers can be good--and sometimes they are too good. If you have given students an in-class writing assignment, you can compare the quality and be quite enlightened.
- Copying an article from the Web or an online or electronic database: Only some of these articles will have the quantity and type of citations that academic research papers are expected to have. If you receive a well-written, highly informed essay without a single citation (or with just a few), it may have been copied wholesale from an electronic source.
- Copying a paper from a local source: Papers may be copied from students who have taken your course previously, from fraternity files, or from other paper-sharing sources near campus. If you keep copies of previous papers turned in to you, they can be a source of detection of this particular practice. Cutting and pasting to create a paper from several sources. The introduction and conclusion are often student-written and therefore noticeably different from and weaker than the often glowing middle.
- Quoting less than all the words copied: This practice includes premature end quotation marks or missing quotation marks. A common type of plagiarism occurs when a student quotes a sentence or two, places the end quotation mark and the citation, and then continues copying from the source. Or the student may copy from the source verbatim without any quotation marks at all, but adding a citation, implying that the information is the student's summary of the source. Checking the citation will expose this practice.
- Faking a citation: In lieu of real research, some students will make up quotations and supply fake citations. The fake citation can be either completely fabricated (The American Journal of Asymmetric Induction Studies), or it can reference a real source (book, journal, or Web site) which contains no such article or words that have supposedly been used. You can discover this practice by randomly checking citations. If you require several Web or other electronic sources for the paper, these can be checked quickly.
