What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is a practice of presenting someone else’s work, ideas, or language as your own and/or without adequately crediting the original source.
Types of Plagiarism
- Direct plagiarism: Copy another author’s work word-by-word without acknowledgement of the source and without quotation marks.
- Patchwriting: Also known as mosaic plagiarism, it occurs when one
- borrows phrases, clauses, or sentences without using quotation marks and without crediting the source
- uses the language and syntax close to the source without crediting the original source
- makes minor changes (e.g., deleting words, changing words here and there, taking, removing, and/or rearranging bits of sentences) to others’ work without crediting the source
- Self-plagiarism: Reuse the work that you have published or submitted without attribution or without explicit permission
- Accidental plagiarism: Neglect to cite the source(s), misquote the source(s), wrongly quote the source(s), or unintentionally paraphrase a source by using similar words, and/or sentence structure without attribution
Why is it important to learn about plagiarism?
- Your credibility as a researcher/writer is established through your ability to analyze sources, properly citing these sources, and your ability to “create knowledge” while building on existing research.
- Providing citation helps readers distinguish your work in the “tree of knowledge” from the work of other researchers. This is how we build knowledge over time in our field—we build upon the work of others.
- Supporting your research with cited sources helps readers with an understanding of what has already been done regarding a specific research question or topic.
How to avoid plagiarism?
Plagiarism is considered an illegal violation of copyright. Plagiarism is also an unethical behavior that violates academic integrity.
To prevent plagiarism, you need to credit the original source(s) adequately and correctly whenever you borrow/use someone else’s works, ideas, information, and/or language.
How to avoid patchwriting?
Patchwriting is the most common challenge that graduate writers face in both coursework and in writing their thesis or dissertation. A basic problem of patchwriting is improper paraphrasing and summary of the source(s).
To avoid patchwriting, use the tips below:
- Track and document the sources you use in your research.
- Understand the source as a whole and then use your own words to summarize and/or paraphrase the source. Credit the original source in an in-text citation and in your reference list.
- Do not use words, phrases, expressions, and/or grammatical structures that are close to the original source(s) when summarizing and/or paraphrasing.
- If you use the exact language of a source, you must enclose it in quotation marks and credit the original source in an in-text citation and in your reference list.
Example: (Adopted from The Writing Center/University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003, p.4–5)
Original Source
Love and Toil maintains that family survival was the mother’s main charge among the large majority of London’s population who were poor or working class; the emotional and intellectual nurture of her child or children and even their actual comfort were forced into the background. To mother was to work for and organize household subsistence. (p. 9)
(A Passage from Love and Toil (a book on motherhood in London from 1870 to 1918) by Ellen Ross, 1995.)
Patchwork
Children of the poor at the turn of the century received little if any emotional or intellectual nurturing from their mothers, whose main charge was family survival. Working for and organizing household subsistence were what defined mothering. Next to this, even the children’s basic comfort was forced into the background (Ross, 1995).
(This patchwriting includes many exact words, expressions, and sentence structures (see the bolded) from the original source. To avoid plagiarism, it should use quotation marks to enclose the exact language and use a proper citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago) to credit the original source in the text and reference list, such as offering the author’s last name, the year of publication, and page number.)
Proper Paraphrase
According to Ross (1995), poor children at the turn of the century received little mothering in our sense of the term. Mothering was defined by economic status, and among the poor, a mother’s foremost responsibility was not to stimulate her children’s minds or foster their emotional growth but to provide food and shelter to meet the basic requirements for physical survival. Given the magnitude of this task, children were deprived of even the “actual comfort” (p. 9) we expect mothers to provide today.
(This paraphrasing is proper because the main idea is conveyed in the writer’s own words; the language and structure are changed; the exact language “actual comfort” is enclosed in quotation marks with adequate attribution to the original source—the author’s last name, the year of publication, and page number.)
How to check plagiarism and patchwriting?
亚色影库 Writing Center’s Graduate Editing Service provides a plagiarism detection service for graduate students through iThenticate, the same program used by the Graduate School to check submitted dissertations and theses for plagiarism and inappropriate source use.
In this service, our editors who are doctoral students at 亚色影库 and have received training from the Jones White Writing Center
- use iThenticate to identify areas where your text is too close to other texts.
- help you understand the report generated by iThenticate.
- make suggestions about how to resolve any plagiarism issues that you will be required to address before you can successfully deposit your dissertation and then graduate.
When can I use the service?
- After the advisor has reviewed it and before it is submitted to reviewers on the committee
- Before your dissertation or thesis is accepted by the Graduate School
How do I use this service?
To request an iThenticate tutorial at our writing center, graduate students follow the steps below:
- Write to scholarly-communication@iup.edu and request an iThenticate tutorial. You must submit your thesis or dissertation 24 hours in advance of the tutorial.
- During the tutorial, a specially trained graduate tutor will work with you to share the iThenticate report, discuss the report, and address any issues of inappropriate source use.