20.03.17

Overview: the Types of Plagiarism You Should Be Aware of

Plagisrism is now a very popular topic to discuss in different fields of science and education. Likewise, it occurs in media quite often, and we hear a new scandal about a professor whose scientific work was plagiarized. That's why today we want to talk about different types of plagiarism.

We can classify the most common types of plagiarism usage into 4 key-issues:

1. Unknown author. It is a classical situation, when a person steals content from the Internet or someone else's work. Sometimes this stealing includes almost the whole work without modifications and improvisations – we usually call it Copy-paste.
2. Professional help. When an agency write a work for you, on top of everything else, it's also considered to be a plagiarism case. Especially, since it is a very prosperous business now.
3. The mix of several different resources. It's the most common case of plagiarism usage. In such a work an author tries to write a seamless transition between borrowed fragments and adhesive elements.
4. The disguise of the text . It is when the meaning and thoughts are the same, but in slightly changed words.

The last type of plagiarism is close to rewriting. The cause of this is, without a doubt, laziness. And often this author can spend the same period of time doing this scientific research on his own, rather than spend much effort on trying to rewrite borrowed text in other words.

And now, we should mention some unusual types of plagiarism. For instance, the one of the most interesting types of academic cheating is to steal from your own previous works. It is called self-plagiarism. Sometimes students can use one written work several times with just a little adaptation. Sometimes student works can be suitable for a number of disciplines. As a result, it is like a self-plagiarized work, without any originality. And on top of that, a student loses a chance to improve his skills and knowledge in this field. Of course, some universities have a strict policy concerning this cases – they give such a work the same status as usual plagiarism. Do not need to say, that punishment can be various from failing a test to a suspension.

Shifty students often make something like a good compilation of texts, or Mosaic plagiarism, when some thoughts they perform like quotation and other express in different way, masking foreign thoughts under his own style, or manner. In this particular case it is so hard to identify the original source. However, the frequency of this problem had led most education institutions to getting an appropriate antiplagiarism software.  

Yet another problem, that helps authors to hide evidence of plagiarism, is an abundant quotation. For example, when a person tries to write borrowed fragments of the text in quotes, like it is demanded,  however, with overdoing it. It is inappropriate to use more words in quotes than your own thoughts. So it's clear, that without a strong rule breaking, the text will lack originality. The problem is that without relevant antiplagiarism software this type of plagiarism is also so hard to define.

Finally, the most hurtful type of plagiarism is when it appears unintentionally. You can be distracted by different books that you've read during a prep time, and it can cause plagiarism, occurring by chance. 

Therefore, from what that has been said above, we recommend you the following - if you want your work be of high quality you should process it through an antiplagiarism program before bringing to a university, or any commission.