How to Prevent Yourself from Plagiarizing

What is Plagiarism? Plagiarism is not just the act of copying someone else’s words and passing them off as your own. It is also the act of taking someone else’s ideas and taking claim or credit for them. Plagiarism can take various forms, in other words—and the best policy to adopt when doing academic research and writing is to always give credit where credit is due.

There is never an advantage to gain from trying to steal someone else’s work—but there is everything to lose. On the other hand, properly citing sources and giving a reference anytime words or ideas are taken from a source is just good, academic practice and there’s no shame in citing other authors.

So long as you contribute something new to the topic, citing other authors is actually looked highly upon: it shows you’ve taken the time to get to know what others have said on the topic. When it comes to recognizing plagiarism, one must be on guard: ideas matter—not just words. Rephrasing words or phrases so that they look original or at least different from the source from which they were taken does not mean that one is free from plagiarism.

For example, in the example given, the student plagiarizes the source material even though words are rephrased. Rephrasing the words is like putting a little window dressing on a product that you have stolen from a competitor—it’s still the same product, you’ve just dressed it up a little. To recognize plagiarism, therefore, one has to pay attention to the ideas behind the content as well as to the actual words used in the content.

As Walden (2018) points out, if the concept is not unique, then one has to credit the source from which it is derived—otherwise it is plagiarism. Of course, that doesn’t mean plagiarism is always intentional. A student might think he is being fair by paraphrasing a source—but really this is plagiarism too if the content produced matches too closely the same ideas and content as the original. A similar problem occurs when a student cites too infrequently, which is the case in the example.

The student cites at the end, but the ideas contained in the whole of the paragraph closely resemble the original, so more than one citation is needed. I believe the student unintentionally plagiarized the original source, since he included a citation at the end to at least give some credit and did attempt to paraphrase the source material.

But two sentences that stand out are the third sentence and the last, both of which contain phrases and ideas that bear a striking resemblance to the original material—and while there is a citation at the end, the only word placed in quotes is “buffing” and this is somewhat disingenuous on the student’s part because the entire list of reasons should really be cited and the citation given is somewhat ambiguous.

I would rewrite the two sentences in this way: “Researchers follow a precise code that obliges them to produce studies which will be checked by their colleagues. However, just because they intend to follow this code does not mean the end result is always in the clear. Sometimes researchers will fail to carry a study all the way to its conclusion or exclude evidence that goes against their original hypothesis in hopes of pushing a narrative that reflects favorably on their sponsors.

These are examples of the types of corruption that researchers in the medical science field are exposed to.” In order to avoid plagiarism in my own writing, firstly, I will always give credit to the person or persons from whom I obtain material, whether these are direct words that I quote or ideas that I paraphrase. Secondly, I will guard against unintentional plagiarism by always expanding on and embellishing ideas that I come across so as to add something to them and make them my own.

2 The study by Hays and Minichiello (2005) uses a qualitative method to explore what music means to elderly people. The researchers conducted interviews with 52 elderly persons to identify “the meaning, importance and function of music” for this sample elderly population (Hays & Minichiello, 2005, p. 437). The quality of evidence was high, as the researchers identified common themes that emerged from the data.

The content of the article was appropriate for the audience: being a scholarly paper, it was written with an academic tone, and the style fit the presumed audience of academics who would be interested in reading the study. I did not pick up on any potential bias. Because the study was exploratory rather than experimental, the authors did not set out to prove anything: instead, they simply set out to.