What is Plagiarism

In simple English, Plagiarism is nothing but illegally copying or stealing ideas, content or thoughts and representing it as their own piece of work. 

It is an unforgivable offense, giving an opportunity to someone let you “kiss” when it is not expected or when nobody is watching, but indeed somebody is watching. 

Same is the case when dealing with the authorship of the articles that are falsely claimed to be owned by someone else, but in fact originally authored by somebody else. 

Origin of the term ‘Plagiarism’

The word plagiarism is derived from the Latin word plagiare, which means to kidnap or abduct or steal. The term plagiarism is quite old but people started gaining awareness towards it when the university students started involving in paying money to the contractors who work for them in writing their projects or thesis, in order to complete their academics. This is called contract cheating.

Due to the development of internet and advancements in technologies, it has become even easier to copy the content from the web. After predicting the level of plagiarism that has been associated with students academics, the professors and researchers of the university came up with an idea of implementing plagiarism detector software to curb plagiarizing. 

Different kinds of plagiarism 

Complete plagiarism—copying a complete article from a book or an article on the website then it is considered to be completely plagiarized. 

Copy-paste plagiarism—to copy a paragraph or some content from the internet into their assignment or article is called copy-paste plagiarism.

Copy-paste reference plagiarism—copying ideas or thoughts of another writer or from another article and pasting it in their assignment without giving any credits to the source, from where the article is picked. This type of plagiarism is mainly performed by students. 

Detecting plagiarism 

On the internet, there are many freely available plagiarism tools to detect the plagiarized content. Many university professors use these tools to check if the research papers submitted by their students contain copied content or not. However, plagiarism by students is considered to be academic dishonesty or academic fraud, and the students are subjected to expulsion if found guilty. 

Steps to prevent plagiarism

Plagiarism is not a serious crime but it is considered to be a serious offense for pretending to depict somebody else’s work as their own work and seeking credits. Originality has become a matter to deal with, though its importance is kept declining. 

Steps to avoid plagiarized content:

Paraphrasing or re-writing an article in your own words without changing the meaning of the content. 
Citing the used quotes or paragraph by another writer will not be counted as plagiarized content. But if failed to cite it, then it will be considered as plagiarized content.

Cross checking assignments or articles before submission, through online free tools can help to reduce the plagiarized content. Online tools such as Grammarly.com, small SEO tools, Duplichecker comes in handy when you want to check for copied content.

One can protect their own articles from plagiarizing by implementing copyright laws to their websites and policies in order to stay away from copyright infringement disputes.