Plagiarism is the process of using others’ words, ideas, and works in your work without giving the original author any credit for the work. If you are borrowing an idea or text, it gets very important to mention in your paper that you took it from another author.
It doesn’t matter if you took an entire piece and few fragments of the words; it is called plagiarism, and plagiarism, in other words, is called stealing.
Plagiarism can take various forms like:
- Paraphrasing or re-wording some other’s work in your own words without changing the idea is also plagiarism.
- Copying the work of some other author without any mention of the author.
- Directly copying and pasting the other person’s work.
- Missing citation of the resources for your work.
- Giving wrong references of the work.
- Using some others’ work and mentioning it as yours.
Copyright violation
Plagiarism can be mostly avoided by citing the sources; however, it simply doesn’t work in some cases. Musicians, artists, and authors have exclusive rights to their products, so if you use their songs, music, books, images, etc., without their permission, you break the rules. There are some universities where a hefty penalty is charged on copyright infringement and plagiarism in Australia.
If your paper has up to 10-15 percentage of plagiarism, then you are safe, but if it is more than 25%, then you are in trouble. However, please ensure that 15% of matching text should contain common terminology, phrases, and concepts. You should use tools to check for plagiarism to make sure that your paper is clean and original.
How to avoid plagiarism?
You should always avoid plagiarism. To write a good paper, you should always use credible outside resources and do the formatting in the correct style. Here are few tips that will help you in preventing plagiarism:
- Mark quotations during prior research – While doing prior research, mark the quotes and add author’s name, book title, and URL to prevent any copyright and plagiarism issue.
- Paraphrasing – If possible, avoid using direct quotes and paraphrase the words as and when possible.
- Adding direct quotes – When adding direct quotes, ensure that the book’s name is placed in the same sentence as the quotation. Don’t copy the full paragraph when you can paraphrase it in one sentence.
- Using another person’s idea – When you are using another person’s idea in your paper, make sure that you add the author’s name in the footnotes.
Use of plagiarism checker:
There are many plagiarism checkers for students available online such as Copyleaks. However, while selecting the right tool, you should ensure that it’s easy to use, affordable and multifunctional. A good tool will provide you a detailed report with the percentage of matching content from the other sources.
To make your work unique, be aware of plagiarism and the helpful tools to check it and avoid copyright violation.