Plagiarism – Top 10 Ways to Stay Out of Trouble When Writing Your Dissertation, Thesis, Or Paper
With increasing frequency, colleges and universities are making use of Web-based plagiarism checking services to scan papers for stolen material. And the consequences can be dire: at one end of the spectrum, a failing grade for the assignment; at the other end, dismissal from an academic program. If you are intentionally plagiarizing in your paper, thesis, or dissertation, this should give you pause. But if you are not intentionally plagiarizing, there could still be reason for concern. Plagiarism checking software catches an ever-growing amount of appropriated material–and sometimes the student has not even meant to do anything wrong! In what follows, I’d like to offer some simple tips for avoiding plagiarism of the unintentional variety.
1. Know what constitutes plagiarism. Simply put, plagiarism is the use of the words or ideas of another person without giving credit to the person from whom they are borrowed. Right off the bat, this tells us something important: you can’t simply change a few words of a borrowed text (so that the passage is no longer a direct quotation) and think that you are out of danger. Unless the material is “common knowledge,” a citation is needed for any material you borrow–whether it is a direction quotation, a paraphrase, or even just an idea.