Types of Plagiarism in Research Writing

With the increasing availability of data over the Internet, the act of copying the ideas or writings is being increasingly reported. Writing practice with academic integrity has specific norms to follow to avoid making a mistake while publishing a research paper or writing thesis. Plagiarism is the act of publishing someone else’s research without giving genuine credits to the author. This is why the scholars are asked to remain cautious while publishing their research as it may lead to serious implications on them. Best Engineering journals accept zero plagiarism only in any research paper publication. Many research paper publication sites have a plagiarism policy of up to 9% for research paper acceptance.

 Lets learn more about it to understand it better.

 1. Direct Plagiarism: It consists of the exact replication of a section of someone else’s work, word by word without providing any reference or without using quotes for the text. This act is unethical and can amount to even disciplinary action.

 Let’s understand from an example. A scholar quotes: The community members seemed lethargic, which was a great hindrance for the engineer to complete the project in time.

 Source Text: When the community members started returning to work, they seemed lethargic, and the engineer found it very difficult to complete the project within the stipulated deadline.

 Direct Plagiarism is very clear in the above text, as the scholar used the original text in his version. Researcher Index has been helping young scholars for publication assistance to avoid such flaws.

 2. Self-Plagiarism: Self Plagiarism is very common among students. It occurs when a student submits his or her own previously submitted research work, or uses extracts, ideas or excerpts from it without seeking the consent of all professors involved. It might sound strange but the relevance of this being considered as a malpractice is so that a student researcher considers himself or herself just like any other researcher. There must be no differential treatment.

 3. Mosaic Plagiarism: This kind of plagiarism takes place when a student writer does not copy another writer’s work word by word, but picks up the core idea, maintains the sentence formation and uses synonyms or similar meaning phrases to rewrite the excerpt. This is also considered an academic bad practice even if citation is done in footnotes. This kind of Plagiarism is also called Patch Writing at times and is a kind of paraphrasing.

 Let’s see the below text.

The Scholar writes: Globally, businesses bear the brunt due to cross-cultural aspect. Common problems like lack of involvement or smooth relationship management are faced generally.

 Original Text: Cultural differences do impact businesses occurring in cross-cultural context. A lot of problems arise in matters of participation, communication and other relational areas.

 The above example shows clearly how an unaware scholar used Mosaic Plagiarism to write his version of text.

 4. Accidental Plagiarism: Accidental Plagiarism is when a student forgets or neglects to cite concerned sources in his paper or paraphrases an excerpt without adding a reference. It can also happen if the referencing added is jumbled and unorderly that makes the source document undiscoverable. This kind of plagiarism is also frowned upon and even lack of intent does not guarantee safety from consequences.

There are many instances when good research work gets remarks merely due to plagiarized delivery. Researchers often look for Scopus paper publication assistance or thesis writing services from Researcher Index to avoid such problems in their academic path.