plagiarism

                                                                       Plagiarism Research Paper

In western concepts, “intellectual property” is defined as “creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images used in commerce (World Intellectual Property Organization). As for academic integrity, the definition is that students and faculty should be honest and responsible in scholarship. L. Milton (2015) pointed out “integrity in academia has also been related to the topic of ‘good governance’, which addresses the values, principles, and outcomes of an organization’s daily operations and the requirement for a workplace to have integrity, standards, guidance, and monitoring” (p. 18). In the Webster dictionary, the integrity means “an adherence to ethical principles” (George Mason University, 2013). The definition of plagiarism is that the using or coping of intellectual property such as ideas, language, research without permission and proper acknowledgement, giving others the false impression that it is original work (Crowder,

Mikulay and E. Turvey 2013). The definition of plagiarism in my own discipline is geoscience is that the action of using stealing or coping someone else’s production, ideas, or research without permission and acknowledging the source and then claiming credit for them (Solarino, 2015).

Academic honest is really significant, since integrity is not only a traditional virtue and moral character, but also a basic principle of doing research and an important norm to evaluate someone’s quality. Besides that, it provides a criterion to reflect and evaluate one’s academic level. Academic integrity is vital for future development of professional career because people with higher integrity are more innovative and productive than those with lower integrity (Bieliauskaitė, 2014). From my personal experience in China, there is an obvious comparison in the view of academic integrity between China and the U.S. When I studied for bachelor degree in Chinese university, sometimes the academic integrity was not important for us. We did not pay much attention to the citation, if we just used a concept or applied the methodological or cited the relevance of other researches. Usually, we provided the citation only when we want to included and cited the result of others. Besides that, Chinese students don’t adopt the APA or MLP format for citation, we use the footnote to mark other sources and write the references in the end of article. Due to this significant academic integrity difference, I was really confused and uncomfortable with those direct quotes and rephrases in western research paper. Now that I know the importance academic integrity, I will pay more attention to avoid the plagiarism.

 

Plagiarism occurs in various ways. According to the website (https://www.bowdoin.edu/studentaffairs/academic-honesty/common-types.shtml), plagiarism may occur in the following forms:

1. Direct Plagiarism

Direct plagiarism is the word-for-word transcription of a section of someone else’s work, without attribution and without quotation marks.

2.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.

3.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.

4.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.

With the rapid development of Internet, there is a new kind of academic dishonesty called cyber plagiarism. It refers to people utilizing internal technology to copy and paste the work or research of others without citing source information.

 

As for avoiding plagiarism, some scholars come up with many tips, such as writing the references in advance in case of forgetting. Or use our own words instead of copy. These might be useful but as far as I’m concerned, the focal point is that we should clearly remember the principle of plagiarism: scholar claims credit for someone else’s work or ideas or uses/copies parts of someone else’s work without acknowledging the source(Solarino, 2015). If we canconstantly remind ourselves what is plagiarism, we will avoid it when writing academic paper.

 

Reference:

  • Jolanta Bieliauskaitė (2014). On the way to professionalism – the     promotion of law students’ academic integrity Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, Volume 116, 21 February 2014, Pages 4229-4234
  • Stan Crowder, Shawn Mikulay, Brent E. Turvey (2013). Chapter 2 – Ethical Issues for Students of Criminal Justice Ethical Justice

·       Stefano Solarino (2015). Chapter 9 Ethical Behavior in Relation to the Scholarly Community: A Discussion on Plagiarism Geoethics

·       Constance L. Milton(2015).   Ethics and Academic Integrity Nursing Science Quarterly 2015, Vol. 28(1) 18–20