¶ … Avoiding Plagiarism and Self-Plagiarism in Academic Writing
Plagiarism can be defined as "copying another's work or borrowing someone else's original ideas" without properly citing or crediting the source from which the information was sourced (What is Plagiarism?, n.d.). However, there are certain things an individual may do to prevent plagiarism and ensure that he or she is not accused of academic or intellectual dishonesty.
In order to prevent plagiarism, one must first be able to recognize and be able to detect plagiarized material. The below passage is demonstrative of plagiarized work and does not properly cite the source material it references.
Consumers must trust that the research that has gone into the manufacture of new drugs is safe. But it is hard to know if a conflict of interest between doctors, researchers, and the drug company stockholders has tainted the results. Biomedical researchers incorporate strict rules of science into their work, which is examined by peers. Yet the resulting information can be warped for five reasons: ending a study too soon, not publishing negative results,...
167).
With the exception of the last sentence, which is the only one that cites the original source, the entire passage has been plagiarized. The first two sentences should be combined into a single sentence, as should the third and fourth sentences. Plagiarism in this section was detected in sentence structure and word choice of the writer. The writer did not paraphrase or introduce new ideas into the section and merely reworded the original source without giving it credit. In other cases, plagiarism can be detected when an individual neglects to cite the work from which they sourced their claims or information. In order to reduce or eliminate plagiarism in this passage, these sentences could be rewritten and cited as follows:
In Tainted: The Manipulation of Fact in America, Crossen (1994) posits that it is difficult to determine if there is a conflict of interest between doctors, researchers, and drug company stockholders that may contribute to tainted results and raise…
