Plagiarism

A topic in research methodology

Plagiarism is the process of presenting as original something that is actually derivative. Usually plagiarism involves presenting someone else's work as your own.

Plagiarism is considered unethical, and scholarly malpractice, and can lead to serious consequences (for serious cases students may fail assignments or even be removed from programmes of study, and academics can be dismissed from their posts).

Plagiarism is normally understood as a deliberate act of deception, but may also result from poor scholarship.

Plagiarism is related to, but quite different from, copyright infringement. The latter is a legal matter, and the former an academic matter.

Plagiarism involves presenting someone else's ideas as if they are you own. (A kind of 'stealing' of someone else's intellectual work).

Good scholarship

Scholarly conventions require that scholars acknowledge the sources of ideas they write about, using standard conventions (footnotes, citations, bibliographic details according to the normal conventions of the specific field). This is usually only possible when the scholar is careful to keep organised and clear notes of ideas they meet in their reading (or attending or viewing talks, etc.) This avoids to potential for forgetting when an idea came from, and of the need to cite the course.

Good scholarship tends to draw on direct quotation from other source in a limited way (except where explicitly critiquing a text etc.), but in any case uses standard conventions to make it very clear to readers when a source is being quoted rather than just cited. This usually means using inverted commas to denote quoted test within a paragraph, or displaying a longer (≥ 40 words) quote as a separate indeed paragraph, perhaps in a distinct font or point size: so use standard conventions to make it very clear to readers when a source is being quoted rather than just cited. This usually means using inverted commas to denote quoted test within a paragraph, or displaying a longer (≥ 40 words) quote as a separate indeed paragraph, perhaps in a distinct font or point size

In either case, citations to bibliographic details need to be made (usually using the name, date convention, and including page references for direct quotations).

'Correcting for plagiarism'?

Some unscrupulous companies that offer services to academics will claim to be able to 'correct for plagiarism'. What they can do, is run screens of the kinds used by journals themselves) to identify excessive overlap of text with previous publications, and then do some paraphrasing to reduce the overlap that will show up. This might solve copyright issues (where an excessive amount of copyright text is copied wholesale from another source), but does NOT prevent plagiarism. As plagiarism is about using other people's ideas without acknowledging them, it is solved by acknowledging the sources of the ideas, not tinkering with the phrasing.

(Read "'Correcting' for plagiarism")

Complications

There are a number of complications in evaluating plagiarism.

Scholarly progress within any programme of research requires immersion within the conceptual, linguistic and methodological norms of the field, and it is expected that scholars build upon the work others…

…and over time (especially decades, centuries) some ideas once seen as offering new thinking become adopted as part of the common background knowledge assumed by all in a field (modern chemists are not expected to offer a citation when they use the concept of the atom or of an element)

Ideas reside in minds, and are not open to direct observation by others.
It is not always easy to judge whether someone's idea is substantially different to someone else's idea.

Different people can independently come to much the same idea – especially when exposed to the same cultural context. ]

Much (most) cognitive process of ideas we have read and heard, and their integration into our thinking, takes place at a preconscious level, not available to introspection. Much plagiarism may be unintended and takes place without the offender being aware!!

Gross plagiarism

Despite these complications it is sometimes found that work submitted for examination or for publication includes material that is in effect cut/copied and pasted from other works. This may infringe copyright, as well as being scholarly misconduct. The use of excessive quotations in place of the author's own argument suggest incomplete or poor scholarship. The use of unattributed quotations mixed into the author's own text is gross carelessness or deliberate cheating. (The defence that 'I did not intend to cheat, I am just a really sloppy scholar', may be convincing, but does not offer any reassurance.)

'Self-plagiarism'

Whether one can actually plagiarise oneself, or the term strictly only applies to taking other people's ideas, there are usually rules that the same (student) work cannot be submitted for examination more than once and that published material cannot be reused in further publications. There may sensibly be overlap between different works (for example several papers reporting different aspects of the same project) but efforts should be taken to limit overlap as much as possible, and be careful not to use the same text in several publications (if copyright has been assigned or licensed to a publisher). Full citation to earlier work helps everyone appreciate the extent to which a new publication is genuinely new rather than a rehash.

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Examples:

Read about an extreme example of plagiarism in a journal article called 'The Chemistry of Indigenous Peoples'

Read about a serial plagiarist: Can academic misconduct be justified for the greater good?

See all articles about plagiarism