Understanding Plagiarism: Types, Detection, and Avoidance

Running head: PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism
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1PLAGIARISM
Plagiarism is an academic dishonesty and is also commonly regarded to be as a
rampant vice among the students (Giluk & Postlethwaite, 2015). There is an ever increasing
concern regarding the increasing level of plagiarism among the college going students. There
are several forms of plagiarism exist and is quite tough for most of the students to master. For
example, copying from the other sources without giving them the credit or paraphrasing the
works of other and not acknowledging them are two of the most common forms of
plagiarism. However, in this paper, I shall demonstrate by understanding on plagiarism and
what I have learnt more on this from the article named “What is Plagiarism and how to avoid
it?” by Ish Kumar Dhammi and Rehan UI Haq. I shall further shed light on the different types
of plagiarism and how to detect and avoid them while writing manuscript.
Definition of plagiarism- From the article mentioned above, I learnt many things in
relation to plagiarism. As per Vehvilainen, Lofstrom and Nevgi (2018), plagiarism refers to
the unreferenced use of the published and unpolished works and ideas of other people. I have
learned very quickly that people can be pretty good at cheating. Plagiarism is something that
can take place at any stage of planning a write up, researching or publication. With the same,
even it is applied to the electronic and print versions as well. I have always thought of
plagiarism to be a wrongful appropriation (Reisig & Bain, 2016). To me, it is something
equal to stealing. Most of us use to think of plagiarism as copying or borrowing the ideas and
work of other people. However, these terms like “borrowing” and “copying” just disguise the
seriousness of this offense. Plagiarism is simply an act of fraud.
Types of plagiarism- There are several different forms of plagiarism and they are-
verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, and paraphrasing, self-plagiarism, Image plagiarism
and cyber plagiarism (Dhammi & Haq, 2016). Firstly, the verbatim plagiarism is when we
use other people’s written words in our own name and do not acknowledge them in any way.
One of the most common form of verbatim plagiarism is when we copy and paste the

2PLAGIARISM
published articles without doing any referencing. Secondly, the mosaic plagiarism refers to
the type of plagiarism in which each and every words are not copied but it involves mixing
our own words in other’s opinions, works or ideas. Thirdly, paraphrasing is one of the most
common type of plagiarism. It is when we rewrite any particular paragraph in our own words.
In this case, we just change few words of the original sentences. Changing few words alone
do not make the whole thing as our own writing. If the original authors or writers are not
acknowledged and if it is not referenced, then it would amount to plagiarism.
Fourthly, self-plagiarism refers to the use of our own earlier work in another context
in absence of citing that it was already used formerly. However, in this form, the main idea is
that we, as the writers, should let out readers know that it was not the very first use of the
material that they are reading. Republishing the text is one of the most common example of
this type of plagiarism. It is also to mention that self-plagiarism is further divided into four
different types and they are- a) duplicate publication, b) augmented publication, c) segmented
publication and, d) text recycling. Duplicate publication is when we submit same manuscript
to two different journals (Juyal, Thawani & Thaledi, 2015). It is a serious offence and in such
cases, the editor could take any action as per the COPE flowchart. On the other hand, the
augmented publication is when we add more data to our formerly published words and
modifies the aim of that study in any way. Thirdly, the segmented publication is when two or
more papers are derived from similar research works. Lastly, text recycling, as the name itself
suggest, is the act when we use huge part of our own published text in our new written
manuscript. It can easily be detected by the plagiarism software. Moreover, as per (), cyber
plagiarism on the other hand can be defined as “downloading or copying in part, or in their
entirety, articles or research papers found on the Internet or copying ideas found on the Web
and not giving proper attribution”. Lastly, the image plagiarism refers to the type of