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One must have academic integrity to study and communicate new ideas while respecting the opinions and contributions of others. Academic integrity is the dedication to ethical behaviours and conduct in academic environments. It is more particularly the requirement that you complete your work, acknowledge others’ contributions to your learning, and be accountable for your learning. You must also refrain from behaviours that undermine academic integrity, including plagiarism and cheating, which are two prominent instances of academic misconduct.
This blog will discuss identifying and avoiding plagiarism as you prepare your assignment. Most students have a vague idea about plagiarism. Therefore, let’s start with understanding the basics of plagiarism.
Plagiarism is the act of using another person’s words or ideas without properly citing them. Plagiarism in academic writing refers to the use of ideas, phrases, or data from a source without properly attributing it. This can actually indicate a number of various things. The table below can give you an idea of the several instances of plagiarism.
Examples of plagiarism | Why is it wrong? |
Copying a text word for word, without any quotation marks | It makes it seem like these are your own words, which is not true. |
Paraphrasing by changing a few words or altering the sentence structure, that too without citing the source | It makes it seem like it is your idea when you have just rephrased others’ ideas. |
Giving wrong or misleading information about a source | If readers can’t find the cited source with the right information, they can’t check the information themselves. |
Quoting so much from a source that it makes up the majority of your text | Even with proper citations, you’re not making an original contribution if you rely so much on someone else’s words. |
Reusing work you’ve submitted for a previous assignment without citing yourself | Even though it’s your own work, the reader should be informed that it’s not completely new but comes from previous research. |
Submitting a text written entirely by someone else. | Not doing the work yourself is academically dishonest, undermines your learning, and is unfair to other students. |
The act of plagiarism poses a serious threat to academic integrity, as well as the overall state of education and knowledge worldwide. With the prevalence of digital technology, it has become easier to commit plagiarism, but also slightly easier to detect it. Therefore, it is important to educate students on what constitutes plagiarism and for both students and educators to be able to identify it in order to take necessary measures to prevent it, especially in light of the growing occurrence and acceptance of stolen content.
There are several ways to commit plagiarism, just as there are numerous ways to define plagiarism. It can take many different forms depending on the situation, the most common of which are as follows:
Direct plagiarism, which includes copying text from another source without giving due credit, occurs when you duplicate another person’s work verbatim and without making any changes.
Complete plagiarism is when you submit an entire piece of work that was written by someone else as your own, such as when you buy an essay and submit it as your own finished assignment.
Misleading attribution is when a work, quotation, or concept is purposely attributed to a fake, erroneous, or nonexistent source. This is also known as source-based plagiarism and includes using information from numerous sources while referencing only one, as well as making up facts and figures and attributing them to reliable sources.
Using work, you’ve completed for a previous assignment or class is self-plagiarism, even if the work is otherwise original. Some lecturers will accept work from a different course that has been requested in advance; this is not considered plagiarism.
Mosaic plagiarism, often referred to as patchwork plagiarism, is the practice of using someone else’s words, ideas, or works without giving them due credit. You can do this by changing the sentence structure or by using synonyms. This kind of plagiarism is extremely challenging to spot because other people’s materials are incorporated with your ideas.
Using your own words to convey someone else’s ideas is known as paraphrasing. When you acknowledge the original author, paraphrasing can raise the standard of your writing and make it easier to understand what others have to say. However, paraphrasing is considered plagiarism if your sources are not cited properly.
When you accurately mention all of your sources but don’t add any original ideas to your paper, you have engaged in aggregating plagiarism.
Accidental plagiarism is when you inadvertently or unintentionally use someone else’s work. This can entail overlooking the need for quotation marks, failing to properly credit a source, or failing to comprehend what constitutes plagiarism.
A plagiarism check is important because it loosens the integrity of your assignment and questions your credibility. Before you submit any of your academic works, it is very important that you check the same for the presence of plagiarism. It is because –
The easiest way to check plagiarism is to use the online tools. Yes, today, there are several online tools that can be used to check the plagiarism percentage in content. Most of these tools are free of cost and are easy to use. Generally, they have a word limit for one-time checking. Due to the same, you can break up your content into parts as per the word count and check them individually. There are premium features for some tools as well. If you cannot afford the same, you can also go for the free tools. They are also equally reliable. The process of checking plagiarism using a tool is discussed below –
Any plagiarism detector’s primary function is to ensure the most accurate text analysis possible.
In an ideal scenario, it would scan online sources such as journals, newspapers, magazines, blogs, articles, websites, internet archives, student papers, various scientific resources, and so forth. If the tool can compare a document to other previously submitted papers, it will be even better for academic writing.
Identifying different forms of plagiarism in written works is a crucial undertaking. These various types include:
Another frequent problem for academic honesty is paraphrasing. It is challenging to determine since a student can alter word forms, tenses, voices, and other factors.
With the rise of AI writing tools, it is getting tougher to tell if a piece is human-generated or not. Solutions like ChatGPT, for instance, can quickly and easily put together an excellent article.
This is why only sophisticated paraphrase checks can effectively prevent GPT-3 cheating. The latter should also determine whether the current document’s style corresponds to earlier works by the same author rather than only searching for textual similarities.
To create an effective plagiarism report, it should contain insightful and easy-to-understand information. Some essential elements of such a report include highlighting potentially plagiarised sections, providing source links that correspond to the text, and showing the percentage of plagiarised and original content. It’s also desirable to have the option to export and share the reports in various formats.
This is about ensuring a pleasant experience in the event that something goes wrong. Service providers are no exception, because no one is perfect. Consider the support team’s working hours, attentiveness, and ability to solve your difficulties.
Finally, seek providers with consistent performance who will not let you down during scans. Sometimes you can only discover it while utilising a plagiarism checker.
The best way to ensure all of these is to give a trial before you genuinely start using the tool. Below sections cover the tools to use while plagiarism checking.
A plagiarism checker is one of a hundred free tools available on the Small SEO Tools website. The application primarily serves the demands of content writers and freelancers who want to ensure that their work is plagiarism-free to improve their SEO ranking. It is not only a contender for the finest online free plagiarism checker; it can also be used as a research tool.
The plagiarism checker in Small SEO Tools allows you to input text into the text box or upload a document in multiple file formats. These formats include txt, doc, and others. It is also possible to upload a document from Google Drive or Dropbox. You can scan up to 1,000 words per search with the free tool. Like with most free services, you can conduct a plagiarism check by entering a webpage URL. You can also exclude a certain URL from your search, which is a paid service with other providers.
Duplichecker is a simple online plagiarism checker that detects duplicate content. It is specifically developed for students who want to maintain the integrity of their academic work, which is why some consider it the finest plagiarism checker free for students.
Duplichecker is a simple application with a text box that allows you to analyse 1,000 words of text in each search. You can also upload a file or enter a URL to check for plagiarism on a particular website.
You will be taken to a results page when you click the Check Plagiarism button. It displays a doughnut graphic of plagiarised vs unique content as well as content with similar meaning.
It will also highlight the words in your work where it discovered similar content, and you can click the link to view it on the site. The findings can also be downloaded as a PDF file. Duplichecker found only 5% of plagiarised information in the identical copy-paste text as the other free plagiarism checkers on this list.
Quetext, regarded by some as the greatest online plagiarism detector, instantly detects plagiarised passages and also functions as citation assistance. It has a free Instant Search feature that allows you to quickly review your work. Their patented Deep Search technology provides contextual analysis, fuzzy matching, and conditional scoring. Quetext was able to correctly detect 100% of content copied and pasted from an academic journal using this method.
Quetext offers a free service that includes five free plagiarism checks per month. For new users, the first 500 words are analysed for free. More searches will necessitate a free registration.
The free plan contains a good number of features to help you avoid incorrectly attributing your sources. The contextual analysis evaluates the context of the sentences as well as how well the words match between different sources. It also uses fuzzy matching to discover synonyms in rewritten phrases.
The most crucial aspect of Turnitin to grasp is that it does not immediately identify plagiarism; instead, it provides a report that allows students and faculty to see where plagiarism may have occurred. No student would be charged with plagiarism until a member of staff thoroughly reviewed this report to ensure that such an accusation is supported by reasonable academic judgement.
The Turnitin database is massive and constantly expanding. Many large publishers have arrangements with Turnitin to incorporate books, journal articles, and conference proceedings when they are released. A project is also underway to add numerous older, out-of-print, and back-catalogue books and articles.
PlagScan is a powerful plagiarism prevention aimed at the academic community. While many other fields use PlagScan, the features that set it unique from other plagiarism solutions appear to be focused on this approach.
Pricing is reasonable, with options for individuals and certain company programs available. On average, prices range from $6 to $50 or more. Advanced features such as API capabilities, support, and more are available on higher-level plans. The option is also to develop more extensive reporting and integrate with existing technologies.
PlagScan, when compared to other tools, is quite good at detecting possibilities, albeit sometimes overly so. There are some errors, such as when it reports a plagiarised item that does not exist, but overall, this programme is fairly accurate.
Common Phrasing/Attributed Use:
PaperRater is a free online proofreading service that allows writers of all skill levels to do an automated quality check on their work. PaperRater performs grammar checks, writing suggestions, and a free plagiarism check. It checks papers for comparable information using a Linux-based operating system.
The PaperRater website, like most free plagiarism checkers, includes a text field where you can paste the text you want to analyse. However, what distinguishes it is the ability to customise the settings for your analysis. From the dropdown menus, you can select your education level, plagiarism detection speed, and the work you submit.
It then examines your work against over 10 billion documents using its proprietary technology dubbed Grendel to give you an originality score.
The free plan of Paperrater allows you to run up to ten plagiarism checks every month. However, the free plagiarism check does not tell you which parts of your text or document were deemed unoriginal by the software. It also did not yield results for content that was totally plagiarised. To have access to additional features, you must purchase a paid Premium plan.
Since plagiarism detection algorithms can only detect copying or similar wording, they fall short in two categories.
This type of plagiarism cannot be discovered because it entails rewriting, translating, or otherwise redrafting the content. This can be tough to get away with because most plagiarism detectors are incredibly sensitive, but because plagiarism detectors just analyse the words, they can’t tell if you lifted the idea or knowledge if you didn’t also steal the words. This is a widespread issue in academia, where this type of plagiarism is treated just as harshly as verbatim plagiarism.
Second, while many plagiarism detectors will attempt to sort out attributed use, given the range of attribution approaches, this is not always practicable. Furthermore, because some phrases are so frequent in English, many plagiarism checkers will report matches that are simply coincidental.
Plagiarism is a serious issue and can even lead to the cancellation of your paper. So it is very important for you to be careful with the same. In case you are using plagiarism checker tools, keep in mind that, at the end of the day, it is a tool working on an algorithm. Thus, it won’t be surprising if the tool is making any mistakes. If need be, double-check the file for more accurate results.
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