Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation,"

or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or
expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion
remains problematic with nebulous boundaries. The modern concept of plagiarism as
immoral and originality as an ideal emerged in Europe only in the 18th century,
particularly with the Romantic movement, while in the previous centuries authors and
artists were encouraged to "copy the masters as closely as possible" and avoid
"unnecessary invention."

Within academia, plagiarism by students, professors, or researchers is considered

academic dishonesty or academic fraud, and offenders are subject to academic censure,
up to and including expulsion. In journalism, plagiarism is considered a breach of
journalistic ethics, and reporters caught plagiarizing typically face disciplinary measures
ranging from suspension to termination of employment. Some individuals caught
plagiarizing in academic or journalistic contexts claim that they plagiarized
unintentionally, by failing to include quotations or give the appropriate citation.

Students may feel pressured to complete papers well and quickly, and with the
accessibility of new technology (the Internet) students can plagiarize by copying and
pasting information from other sources. This is often easily detected by teachers for
several reasons.

Students' choices of sources are frequently unoriginal; instructors may receive the same
passage copied from a popular source from several students. It is often easy to tell
whether a student used his or her own "voice".

Students may choose sources which are inappropriate, inaccurate, or off-topic. Fourth,
lecturers may insist that submitted work is first submitted to an online plagiarism
detector.

Reasons:

1. The previous work needs to be restated in order to lay the groundwork for a new
contribution in the second work.

2. Portions of the previous work must be repeated in order to deal with new evidence
or arguments.

3. The audience for each work is so different that publishing the same work in
different places was necessary to get the message out.

4. The author thinks they said it so well the first time that it makes no sense to say it
differently a second time.
Deducting Plagiarism
Free online tools are becoming available to help identify plagiarism, and there is a range
of approaches that attempt to limit online copying, such as disabling right clicking and
placing warning banners regarding copyrights on web pages. Instances of plagiarism that
involve copyright violation may be addressed by the rightful content owners sending a
DMCA removal notice to the offending site-owner, or to the ISP that is hosting the
offending site.

Detecting plagiarism even by detection tools can still be difficult, as plagiarism is often
held to not only be the mere copying of text, but also the presentation of another's ideas
as one's own, regardless of the specific words or constructs used to express that idea.
However, many so-called plagiarism detection services can only detect blatant word-for-
word copies of text.

As a practical issue

In addition to legal and ethical concerns, plagiarism is frequently also a practical issue, in
that it is frequently useful to consult the sources used by an author, and plagiarism makes
this more difficult. There are a number of reasons why this is useful:

An author may commit an error in how they interpret or use a source, and consulting the
original source allows these errors to be detected.

Authors generally only supply the portions of prior works that are directly relevant to the
work at hand. Other portions of their sources are likely to be relevant to later extensions
and generalizations of their work.

As modern automated indexing methods become prevalent, references between works

provide valuable information about their authoritativeness and how closely works are
related; this helps to locate relevant works.

Academic plagiarism is rising in India. A lack of oversight and a lack of proper training
for scientists have created the rise of plagiarism and research misconduct in India. India
does not have a statutory body to deal with scientific misconduct in academia, like the
Office of Research Integrity in the US, and hence cases of plagiarism are often dealt in
ad-hoc fashion with different routes being followed in different cases. In most cases, a
public and media outcry leads to an investigation either by institutional authorities or by
independent enquiry committees. The authors responsible for plagiarism have been at the
receiving end of some severe punishments including suspension, removal and demotion.
However, no fixed route has been prescribed to monitor such activities.

Plagiarism detection is the process of locating instances of plagiarism within a work or

document. The widespread use of computers and the advent of the Internet have made it
easier to plagiarize the work of others. Most cases of plagiarism are found in academia,
where documents are typically essays or reports. However, plagiarism can be found in
virtually any field, including scientific papers, art designs, and source code.
Detection can be either manual or computer-assisted. Manual detection requires
substantial effort and excellent memory, and is impractical in cases where too many
documents must be compared, or original documents are not available for comparison.
Computer-assisted detection allows vast collections of documents to be compared to each
other, making successful detection much more likely.

Turnitin is an Internet-based plagiarism-prevention service created by iParadigms, LLC.

Typically, universities and high schools buy licenses to submit essays to the Turnitin
website, which checks the documents for unoriginal content. The results can be used to
identify similarities to existing sources or can be used in formative assessment to help
students learn how to avoid plagiarism and improve their writing.

Students may be required by schools to submit essays to Turnitin, as a deterrent to

plagiarism. This has been a source of criticism, with some students refusing to do so in
the belief that requiring it constitutes a presumption of guilt. Additionally, critics have
alleged that use of the software violates educational privacy and intellectual property
laws.