Academic Plagiarism and its Relevance to Business Professionalism

This essay explores the concept of academic plagiarism, defining it as the act of copying someone else's work or ideas and presenting them as one's own, a violation of copyright laws. The essay emphasizes the importance of understanding and avoiding plagiarism in academic writing, as it is crucial for maintaining professionalism in a business environment. It delves into the various types of plagiarism, including direct, self, mosaic, accidental, and mashup plagiarism, highlighting the role of the internet in facilitating plagiarism. The essay further discusses the significance of academic integrity in building trust, fostering ethical conduct, and ensuring the quality of work within a business setting. It outlines the potential consequences of plagiarism, such as demotion or termination, and provides strategies for avoiding plagiarism, including proper citation, paraphrasing, and understanding the original text. The essay concludes by emphasizing the need for training and team collaboration to improve academic writing and integrity in business environments.

ESSAY

TABLE OF CONTENTS
TOPIC..............................................................................................................................................1
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................1
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................4

TOPIC
“What is academic plagiarism and why is academic integrity relevant to professionalism in a
business environment?”
INTRODUCTION
Academic writing can be defined as a clear, concise, structured, focussed way which helps
in improving an individual’s understanding and writing in a proper manner (Eckert, 2018). It is
extremely important for an individual to understand importance of academic writing so that they
can under and avoid plagiarism. This essay will lay emphasis on academic plagiarism and why
academic integrity is important for maintaining professionalism in business environment. This
essay will discuss plagiarism and ways in which it is related to academic writing, then why
academic integrity is important in business environment and lastly will help in highlighting ways
in which plagiarism can be avoided.
MAIN BODY
Plagiarism can be defined as copying someone else work or ideas and pretending or
presenting it as one’s own work. It is simply violating copyright laws. It is one of the most
important thing that one should be careful of while writing anything because copying someone
else’s work and pretending it to be one’s own and not acknowledging the source from where it
came from is a serious offence. Is not only an annoying thing for the original writer but it is quite
dangerous for the person who copies it because if it is spotted in your writing then the school or
college has the right to fail that person in exam. It is one of the most serious offence in schools or
colleges and for this they can send the person down from the university (Gray and Biber, 2018).
Plagiarism can be identified in three different manners: first when the teachers know the subject
really well, second when teachers know all the books a student has referred and third when there
is a change in writing style of the essay. Because of this it is clear that it is directly related to
academic writing. There are five main types of plagiarism. First is direct plagiarism in which
someone else work is directly copied and only some minor changes are made. Self-plagiarism in
which students directly submits all parts f their own work without getting their professors
permission. Mosaic plagiarism which is also known as patch writing when other’s work is used
without using quotation marks (Atkinson, Nau and Symons, 2016). Accidental plagiarism in
which students does not site their sources or does not give credit to original author. Mas up in
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which two or more data sources are turned into one. Internet has played a vital role in plagiarism
as all kinds of data or information is directly available on internet.
In order to maintain professionalism in business environment it is important to maintain
academic writing. Maintaining academic integrity helps an individual to build trust among other
so that they can trust an individual easily with their work i.e. others can understand and trust
within one’s honesty. In business environment it is extremely important for employees to trust
their leaders or managers and it can only happen when their oleanders or managers maintain
academic integrity. Good reputation of leaders helps them to maintain trustworthiness, honesty,
be fair and follow work ethics as well. Lack of academic integrity can create various kinds of
academic issues and also degrade work quality. This academic integrity also helps in developing
professionalism within an individual and they can work more independently maintaining their
work quality (Dutkiewicz, 2016). There are various consequences that an employee can face
because of lack of academic integrity as copy pasting someone else’s work at workplace can
result in serious consequences such as demotion, termination etc. it can also result in lack of
intellectual properties of an employees as they won’t be able to work on their own original ideas
and result in copy pasting other’s work. In business world copying other employees work is a
serious offence which can put them into facing some serious consequences. There are various
real-life examples in which due to lack of academic integrity corruption within organizations was
increasing slowly and steadily where due to this lack of academic integrity creativity of
employees was slowly getting degraded and organizations were not able to achieve desired
results. Many companies have faced law suits like copyright and patent issues like in 1988 Apple
sued Microsoft for copying their content display.
There are various ways through which plagiarism can be avoided. It not necessary that if
people know what plagiarism is they can avoid plagiarism, it is important for to understand and
learn ways in which plagiarism can be avoided. First and the foremost thing it is important to cite
the source from which content had been taken for the research. Whenever, work is cited it is
important for the writer to put it in the same manner as it is written. It is also important to
understand and know the original source from which the content has been taken (Cronan,
Mullins and Douglas, 2018). Other than this there is another way through which plagiarism can
be avoided which is: by reading and understanding the original text and understanding the main
points of the text. Then rephrase the points in one’s own words and then using this information
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one can carryout their work even n this one should cite the information which is directly taken
from the original text. So it can be said that in order to avoid plagiarism it is important for the
writer to quote original text, site source of original text, reference all the sources that has been
used for the writing etc. In business academic writing and integrity can be improved in many
ways such as: by providing proper training to the employees they can improve their work and
learn to be creative (Akrivou, 2015). Employees can be divided into teams so that while working
teams they can improve their work. If plagiarism is detected then employees should be informed
about it so that they can understand where they did mistake.
CONCLUSION
From the above essay it has been summarized that it is important to teach academic writing
to students so that they can learn ways in which they can avoid plagiarism and learn academic
integrity as it helps them in learning professionalism in business organizations.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Akrivou, K., 2015. Towards (more) integrity in academia, encouraging long-term knowledge
creation and academic freedom. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics. 15(1).
pp.49-54.
Atkinson, D., Nau, S.Z. and Symons, C., 2016. Ten Years in the Academic Integrity Trenches:
Experiences and Issues. Journal of Information Systems Education. 27(3). pp.197-207.
Cronan, T.P., Mullins, J.K. and Douglas, D.E., 2018. Further understanding factors that explain
freshman business students’ academic integrity intention and behavior: Plagiarism and
sharing homework. Journal of Business Ethics. 147(1). pp.197-220.
Dutkiewicz, K., 2016. Academic Writing for International Students of Business. Journal of
International Students. 6(1). pp.319-322.
Eckert, S.E., 2018. Plagiarism. The International Journal of Oral & Maxillofacial Implants.
33(6).
Gray, B. and Biber, D.E., 2018. Academic writing as a locus of grammatical change The
development of phrasal complexity features. In Studies in Corpus Linguistics (pp. 117-
146). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
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