The Plague of Plagiarism
Internet publishing today has reached undreamed proportions with ever-growing article sites and blogs.
One of the most important issue facing bloggers and writers today is the issue of plagiarism.
There are few intellectual crimes more serious than plagiarism in professional and academic contexts.
What is Plagiarism? Dictionary.
com defines plagiarism as: the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.
According to Wikipedia plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgment.
An accusation of plagiarism can cost you heavily, including being kicked out from a job, loss of integrity and professional reputation.
While the history of plagiarism in academic circles are centuries old, the development of the Internet, where articles appear as electronic text, has made the physical act of copying the work of others much easier.
Simply by copying and pasting text from one web page to another you have created an article of your own.
Is copying some words wrong?! The answer is yes, according to law.
The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property, and is protected by copyright laws, just like inventions and patents.
Almost all forms of creative expression, whether a book or a website, falls under copyright protection laws.
Without correct guidelines, it may be hard for people to understand the seriousness of plagiarism.
"How can copying some words actually hurt anyone?" But the reality is that plagiarism is an act of deception.
It involves not only stealing a writer's intellectual property but also lying about it afterwards, claiming a creative work as one's own.
This is detrimental to the principles of trust and belief that make respect possible.
Online plagiarism is a growing phenomenon since it is very easy to steal content from the web by simply copying and pasting.
This trend, also known as content scraping, is affecting both established sites and blogs.
Often the motivation for doing this is to attract to one's own site part or all of an original site's search engine-generated web traffic and to convert these stolen visitors into revenue through the use of online ads.
Free online tools are now available for finding and preventing plagiarism, and there are lots of methods that attempt to limit online copying, such as disabling right clicking and placing warning banners against plagiarism on web pages.
According to Wikipedia identified instances of plagiarism are commonly 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.
Be careful! Delaware Senator Joe Biden was forced out of the 1988 US Presidential when it was discovered that parts of his campaign speeches were plagiarized from speeches by British Labour party leader Neil Kinnock and Robert Kennedy.
Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" was reported to contain plagiarized passages from at least five other novels.
All editions of the book were subsequently withdrawn, her publishing deal with Little, Brown and Co.
was revoked, and a film deal with Dreamworks SKG was cancelled.
A Pakistani ezine, Wecite, was found to have plagiarized as many as 11 articles in its May 2007 issue, many of them verbatim, from various sources on the web, including Hindustan Times, Rediff, Blogcritics, Vis-a-Vis magazine and Slate magazines.
[40] The ezine management pulled the website and apologised, terming the plagiarism a product of the "mis-use" of authority by writers and editors of the magazines, and promising to deal with the plagiarists accordingly but "by no means" letting the "genuine efforts of its [other] writers, administration, and management suffer for it".
Prevent it from happening to you Planning your article well in advance is the first and most important step you can take towards preventing plagiarism.
If you know you are going to use other sources of information, you need to plan how you are going to include them in your paper.
You need to work out a balance between ideas you have taken from other sources and your own ideas.
Write an outline and come up with a statement in which you have clearly identified an argument about the information you have.
This will help to distinguish the boundaries between your ideas and those of your sources.
Imp: Cite sources when in doubt Of course you want to get credit for your own ideas.
You don't want others thinking that you got all of your information from somewhere else.
When you are unclear if a statement or an idea in your work really came from you, or whether you got it from somewhere else and just changed it a little, you should always cite your source.
Citing sources never make you appear not competent enough in your field of expertise.
It will only strengthen your work by showing that you are well-informed about your sources and lend credibility to your work.
How do you identify good sources, especially on the internet? Not all sources on the web are worth citing-- in fact, many of them are full of blunders or just plain wrong.
So how do you tell the good ones apart? For starters, make sure you know the author of the site/article you are referring.
Try to find out where and when they got their information.
Remember, ultimately it is up to you to determine how credible the source is: how well they support your ideas, the quality of the writing, and the accuracy of the information provided, etc.
So go right ahead and express your ideas in your articles, your speeches or your website but remember - in your own words! This article has facts taken from Wikipedia and Plagiarism.
org
One of the most important issue facing bloggers and writers today is the issue of plagiarism.
There are few intellectual crimes more serious than plagiarism in professional and academic contexts.
What is Plagiarism? Dictionary.
com defines plagiarism as: the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work.
According to Wikipedia plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgment.
An accusation of plagiarism can cost you heavily, including being kicked out from a job, loss of integrity and professional reputation.
While the history of plagiarism in academic circles are centuries old, the development of the Internet, where articles appear as electronic text, has made the physical act of copying the work of others much easier.
Simply by copying and pasting text from one web page to another you have created an article of your own.
Is copying some words wrong?! The answer is yes, according to law.
The expression of original ideas is considered intellectual property, and is protected by copyright laws, just like inventions and patents.
Almost all forms of creative expression, whether a book or a website, falls under copyright protection laws.
Without correct guidelines, it may be hard for people to understand the seriousness of plagiarism.
"How can copying some words actually hurt anyone?" But the reality is that plagiarism is an act of deception.
It involves not only stealing a writer's intellectual property but also lying about it afterwards, claiming a creative work as one's own.
This is detrimental to the principles of trust and belief that make respect possible.
Online plagiarism is a growing phenomenon since it is very easy to steal content from the web by simply copying and pasting.
This trend, also known as content scraping, is affecting both established sites and blogs.
Often the motivation for doing this is to attract to one's own site part or all of an original site's search engine-generated web traffic and to convert these stolen visitors into revenue through the use of online ads.
Free online tools are now available for finding and preventing plagiarism, and there are lots of methods that attempt to limit online copying, such as disabling right clicking and placing warning banners against plagiarism on web pages.
According to Wikipedia identified instances of plagiarism are commonly 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.
Be careful! Delaware Senator Joe Biden was forced out of the 1988 US Presidential when it was discovered that parts of his campaign speeches were plagiarized from speeches by British Labour party leader Neil Kinnock and Robert Kennedy.
Kaavya Viswanathan's first novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" was reported to contain plagiarized passages from at least five other novels.
All editions of the book were subsequently withdrawn, her publishing deal with Little, Brown and Co.
was revoked, and a film deal with Dreamworks SKG was cancelled.
A Pakistani ezine, Wecite, was found to have plagiarized as many as 11 articles in its May 2007 issue, many of them verbatim, from various sources on the web, including Hindustan Times, Rediff, Blogcritics, Vis-a-Vis magazine and Slate magazines.
[40] The ezine management pulled the website and apologised, terming the plagiarism a product of the "mis-use" of authority by writers and editors of the magazines, and promising to deal with the plagiarists accordingly but "by no means" letting the "genuine efforts of its [other] writers, administration, and management suffer for it".
Prevent it from happening to you Planning your article well in advance is the first and most important step you can take towards preventing plagiarism.
If you know you are going to use other sources of information, you need to plan how you are going to include them in your paper.
You need to work out a balance between ideas you have taken from other sources and your own ideas.
Write an outline and come up with a statement in which you have clearly identified an argument about the information you have.
This will help to distinguish the boundaries between your ideas and those of your sources.
Imp: Cite sources when in doubt Of course you want to get credit for your own ideas.
You don't want others thinking that you got all of your information from somewhere else.
When you are unclear if a statement or an idea in your work really came from you, or whether you got it from somewhere else and just changed it a little, you should always cite your source.
Citing sources never make you appear not competent enough in your field of expertise.
It will only strengthen your work by showing that you are well-informed about your sources and lend credibility to your work.
How do you identify good sources, especially on the internet? Not all sources on the web are worth citing-- in fact, many of them are full of blunders or just plain wrong.
So how do you tell the good ones apart? For starters, make sure you know the author of the site/article you are referring.
Try to find out where and when they got their information.
Remember, ultimately it is up to you to determine how credible the source is: how well they support your ideas, the quality of the writing, and the accuracy of the information provided, etc.
So go right ahead and express your ideas in your articles, your speeches or your website but remember - in your own words! This article has facts taken from Wikipedia and Plagiarism.
org
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