Day 24: Types of Plagiarism

Plagiarism comes from the Latin plagiarus which means kidnapper...like, kidnapping someone else's words or ideas. In the scientific community, plagiarism is a death sentence and once a researcher is known to take the words or thoughts of another researcher, word spreads fast and it would be difficult to rebuild credibility.

This is NOT my Book of Days!

There are 3 kinds of plagiarism: global, patchwork, and incremental. Global is taking the whole piece of work (lock, stock, and barrel) and claiming for one's own. Few people are unwise enough to do this, especially when the internet can expose a plagiarist so fast. It would be like taking a whole book of days and putting my name on it, thereby claiming it as my work! Yikes!

A patch here, a patch there
and plagiarism builds.
THIS is not my book.

Even patchwork plagiarism, which is taking bits and pieces from various places and putting them together, can be uncovered with programs such as TurnItIn which can search the internet and locate original sources for phrases and paragraphs. Even at the basic level, any professor can type in a suspicious sentence into a search box and find the location of the original text.

Forgetting to go back
and paraphrasing and citing
is a common student inaction
that leads to plagiarism.

The most common type of plagiarism that students do is incremental. In this type of plagiarism, information may or may not be paraphrased, but then is not cited. In this day of the internet, it is easy to copy-and-paste and even with the best intentions forget to go back and cite (or be lazy?). The internet has made information searching easier, but at the same time has concerned the scientific community because of the ease with which a person can plagiarize.