Essay: Understanding Academic Plagiarism and Professionalism

This essay delves into the concept of academic plagiarism, defining it as the misrepresentation of others' work as one's own, without proper attribution. It explores various types of plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, clone plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, and accidental plagiarism, highlighting the role of the internet in making plagiarism easier. The essay also discusses academic professionalism, emphasizing its importance in business and the consequences of lacking it. Furthermore, it provides practical strategies to avoid plagiarism, such as keeping track of sources, using quotes and paraphrasing correctly, citing sources, and utilizing plagiarism checkers. The essay concludes by underscoring the significance of understanding and avoiding plagiarism to maintain academic integrity and professionalism.

WHAT IS
ACADEMIC
PLAGIARISM?

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................3
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................5
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION
Academic Plagiarism is representing someone else's ideas and work as self work, without
any consent from them, by assimilating it into the self work without full concession. This essay
covers the concept of plagiarism its relevance in academic writing, academic professionalism
and the ways of avoiding plagiarism.
MAIN BODY
Academic Plagiarism is the intentional attempt to betray the reader through the abduction
and representation as one's own work and the words of some other. AP happen when a author
repeatedly uses over three to four words simultaneously from a written source without the usage
of quotation marks and exact reference to the original source work presented as the writer's own
research (Meuschke and et.al., 2018). If the plagiarism is spotted by the college/ university in the
writing, university has right to fail essay, assignment or in exam. In the most serious
circumstance, cheating this way may lead student down from the university. So it is very
essential to ensure that no plagiarism arise in the writing and further discussed are the ways to
avoid plagiarism. The following are the types of plagiarism that can occur in writing:
Self Plagiarism – This type of plagiarism arise when the writer(student) has copied his own
previous work, or mixed the pieces of previous work with the recent work without any
permission from the authority(professor).
Clone or Direct Plagiarism – This type plagiarism occurs when the writer has used the work
(word for word) of someone else's work, without any changes or claim in owns work. This is the
intended plagiarism which is unethical and academically dishonest.
Mosaic Plagiarism – This type of plagiarism is also called patch writing, arises when the writer
use phrase from the original source without using the quotation marks synonyms for the original
author writing, and keeping to same common structure (Foltýnek, Meuschke and Gipp, 2019).
Accidental Plagiarism – This type of plagiarism occurs when the writer forgets or neglects to
cite the concepts relevant sources, or intendedly paraphrase using interchangeable words, or
misquote or distort their sources.
Role of internet in Plagiarism -
Internet made the plagiarism easier; it made plagiarism more common or maximized its
temptation, and it is obvious if the anything is easy to do it will be done more. Internet made the

detecting plagiarism effortless, prior to internet it was difficult to detect the plagiarist and people
work hard, but the rise of search engine made it easier to find 'word for word' plagiarism.
Academic professionalism refers to the competence or the skill that a professional should
possess. Basically, it is an attitude, a good sense and a code of conduct that respects the effective
capacity of individual status (Singh and Remenyi, 2016). There are three main elements of
academic professionalism – behavioural (relates to the what practitioners physically do at work),
attitudinal(relates to the attitude related to perceptions, belief and opinion of individual) and the
intellectual (associate to the practitioner). With the help of academic professionalism an
individual can grow and become the best business professional. Individuals commitment to
excellence, integrity, conduct, humility, expertise etc. translates well to the workplace, that's why
the focus on academic professionalism has grown now-a-days and the mentors prepare students
for the real world. Professionalism shows the individual self-discipline, work practice and trust,
respect and value that are very necessary for the business growth. A professional should posses
the expertise, discipline, dedication, confidence which is the factor of his own growth and
success in the future. Graduates who possess high personal unity can become better employers
for the society. The lack of academic professionalism may lead to unethical acts in the future,
while being the business professional. Individual can carry out wrongdoings that are against the
organization and may cause damage to its reputation and goodwill. Generally, these employees
choose to do things according to their way. For Example – It can be analysed when the employee
is not performing up to mark or have poor time management skills, or there is sense of
entitlement, mediocre work ethics not working regularly.
Here are few ways discussed below to avoid plagiarism and improve your academic
writing and professionalism within a business setting-
Keep an eye on sources – Individual who is writing content or while doing research, must
ensure to record the source from each piece of information (Vrbanec and Meštrović, 2017). This
pitfall cab be easily avoided by organising ad compiling the list of citations.
By using Quote and Paraphrase – While writing any content sometimes, quoting text word
from word through literature is inescapable. In that case, it is suggested to use or include
quotation marks (“”) if the writing about the original source and cite the source quoted.
Paraphrase means to use one's own words to explain any concept from the source. Using
paraphrasing individual can provide the essential information from the paragraph or passage. In

simple words, the author's main idea has been rephrased & condensed; the sentences are
restructured and the order of information is changed.
Cite the primal source – Whenever there is usage of quote and paraphrase, individual must
ensure an in-text or footnote citations with the publication year that identifies the authentic
author or writer. Every citation should correspond to full reference in bibliography at the end of
the content or paper. There are various different styles of citation to be done but one must use the
same citation style in the whole paper.
Use of Plagiarism Checker – Before submitting the content written or the paper, individual must
check the plagiarism using the plagiarism checker (Fazilatfar, Elhambakhsh and Allami, 2018).
If the plagiarism occurs, reasons of potential plag can be identified such as the part where the
citation is forgotten, quotation mark left out or done paraphrase which is too close to the original
text and then correction can be done.
CONCLUSION
The following essay above discuss the concept of academic plagiarism in detail;it relevance and
types and its role of internet in plagiarism. It also explains the academic professionalism
relevance to professionalism in Business and the consequences of academic plagiarism. This
essay, further highlight the ways of avoiding plagiarism and improving academic writing.

REFERENCES
Books and journals
Fazilatfar, A.M., Elhambakhsh, S.E. and Allami, H., 2018. An investigation of the effects of
citation instruction to avoid plagiarism in EFL academic writing assignments. Sage
open. 8(2). p.2158244018769958.
Foltýnek, T., Meuschke, N. and Gipp, B., 2019. Academic plagiarism detection: a systematic
literature review. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR). 52(6). pp.1-42.
Meuschke, N., and et.al., 2018, June. HyPlag: a hybrid approach to academic plagiarism
detection. In The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research &
Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 1321-1324).
Singh, S. and Remenyi, D., 2016. Plagiarism and ghostwriting: The rise in academic
misconduct. South African Journal of Science. 112(5-6). pp.1-7.
Vrbanec, T. and Meštrović, A., 2017, May. The struggle with academic plagiarism: Approaches
based on semantic similarity. In 2017 40th International Convention on Information and
Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO) (pp. 870-875).
IEEE.
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