In order to avoid plagiarism, we first need to understand what plagiarism is.  Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s ideas without giving the person credit.  Whether it is an idea, an image, spoken words, written words, sheet music, audio, video, a piece of artwork, or anything else that is expressing an idea, if it is not yours you need to say where it came from. 

When you are using someone else’s work exactly, whether copying from a writing they did into your own writing, or writing down what someone said to include in your own writing, you need to indicate that these words are not your own.  You do this by putting the words into quotation marks, similar to what you see in a book where it indicates that someone else is speaking.  After the quotation ends, you need to give credit to the person who is ‘speaking’ in your paper or speech.

When you are using someone else’s ideas, but not their exact words, you are paraphrasing.  Paraphrasing is using your own words to express the other person’s idea.  Even if you paraphrase, you still need to give credit for that person’s original ideas.  You do this by giving credit to the person who created the idea, but you do not need to use quotation marks.

Direct Plagiarism                       

Direct plagiarism is the word-for-word transcription of a section of someone else’s work, without attribution and without quotation marks. The deliberate plagiarism of someone else's work is unethical, academically dishonest, and grounds for disciplinary actions, including expulsion.

Self Plagiarism

Self-plagiarism occurs when a student submits his or her own previous work, or mixes parts of previous works, without permission from all professors involved. For example, it would be unacceptable to incorporate part of a term paper you wrote in high school into a paper assigned in a college course. Self-plagiarism also applies to submitting the same piece of work for assignments in different classes without previous permission from both professors.

a) Duplicate publication: Publication of same papers with similar content that were

already published.

b) Salami publications: Publishing several papers out of results of a single study. But the issue of number of articles that can be generated from a single research project is still unsettled.

c) Text recycling: Publishing the same work in different journals/languages. The undesirable effects of plagiarism include wasting of space in journals, wasting of reviewers time, risk of professional liability and copyright violation, inflation of importance of a topic and reward for falsehood. Recently, availability of abundant material on similar subject through simple internet search has resulted in increase in incidents of plagiarism. The same internet made it easier to detect plagiarism with the help of software to expose plagiarism

Mosaic Plagiarism

Mosaic Plagiarism occurs when a student borrows phrases from a source without using quotation marks, or finds synonyms for the author’s language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original. Sometimes called “patch writing,” this kind of paraphrasing, whether intentional or not, is academically dishonest and punishable – even if you footnote your source

Accidental Plagiarism

Accidental plagiarism occurs when a person neglects to cite their sources, or misquotes their sources, or unintentionally paraphrases a source by using similar words, groups of words, and/or sentence structure without attribution. (See example for mosaic plagiarism.) Students must learn how to cite their sources and to take careful and accurate notes when doing research. (See the Note-Taking section on the Avoiding Plagiarism page.) Lack of intent does not absolve the student of responsibility for plagiarism. Cases of accidental plagiarism are taken as seriously as any other plagiarism and are subject to the same range of consequences as other types of plagiarism.