The first image that springs to us when we hear the word plagiarism is of a high school or college student plagiarising on a paper. The reality, however, may be more disparate since we often read news reports about well-known individuals, educators, instructors, and political leaders who have engaged in some form of plagiarism. Due to allegations of plagiarism, the German defence minister was under pressure to resign this week. Following the discovery of significant instances of plagiarism in his PhD thesis, Mr. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned from his position on Thursday. It appears that the former defence minister used a significant quantity of text from a previously known article in his research but failed to cite his sources.
Similar to this, Rene Lafreniere, a renowned head of surgical treatment at the University of Calgary, was discovered to have plagiarised by copying material from magazines connected to medicine without properly attributing the source. Rene is still actively practising, in contrast to Mr. Guttenberg, and has never been subjected to disciplinary action for plagiarism. To find plagiarisn in your article, one must have copyscape alternative.
It is clear that plagiarism affects a wide range of people from all facets of society. One of the most common errors made while tackling this issue is to brand those who plagiarised as cheaters and proceed with punitive measures like punishment. This method is fundamentally inadequate because it fails to understand the social and psychological factors that contribute most to copying. To put it simply, no one plagiarises just for the pleasure of plagiarising. Instead, you will find that there are a variety of circumstances at play that lead someone to steal content from a site without giving due credit to the original author.
Prior to examining some of these elements, it is critical to comprehend what plagiarism is and how students typically end up doing this dreadful offence. Plagiarism may be defined as the act of taking someone else’s words or ideas without giving them due credit. As a result, plagiarism occurs whenever you accurately acknowledge the source but yet copy something from another source. This becomes more challenging when someone accidentally omits references, which happens to the majority of students due to poor organisation or just general mental and physical exhaustion.
Other factors, such as a lack of library skills, are among the causes of plagiarism among college students. Many teachers just assume that their pupils already possess the fundamentals of academic writing, which is typically not the case. Many university students have never written a real research paper in their life and are unfamiliar with the many academic styles, including MLA and APA. Many of those college students lack the knowledge necessary to consistently include quotations into their writing and correctly credit the sources in the bibliography. Therefore, a great deal of students who were pressed for time would just copy text from a book or a website and continue writing without recognising that each outside source needed to be referenced correctly.
Generally speaking, instructors must assume responsibility for preventing plagiarism and ensure that students have the necessary information to do so right away. It is as well recommended that college students use an internet based plagiarism detector to check out their writing before submitting it to their own professor.