ENGL 101 Writing from Sources I

One of the aspects of scholarly work is giving attribution to ideas and information sources that you use giving credit where it is due. Failure to do so diminishes your credibility and violates the principles of academic integrity. Plagiarism is the work done by others as your own work without giving credit. This can occur deliberately or inadvertently, but in either case, it is a violation of academic integrity.

The two most common violations (Clone and CTRL-C) may be most familiar to you. Reflect on the 8 less common violations, identify one that you may have committed (or you could imagine committing due to carelessness) and share steps you can take to avoid it.

Plagiarism is one of the key issues that adversely affect the scholarly works. It is an academic malpractice that denies an individual's credibility and integrity. Hence, practicing plagiarism is unethical especially when a person intends to present plagiarized work and expect excellent academic performance.   Apparently, Lathrop & Foss (2015) argue that the advancement of technology and emergence of the digital era, individuals may be practicing plagiarism either intentionally or inadvertently without considering the repercussions of the same. The main aim of this paper, therefore, is to reflect on some eight uncommon academic violations.

 Besides, the two common violations on scholarly work, that is Clone and CTRL+C, there are other rare violations that individual may commit knowingly or unknowingly. One of these violations is Find-Replace. Find-Replace is a situation where an individual changes the key words as well as phrases on a particular scholarly work.  The basic content of the source of the academic work is however retained thus resulting to plagiarism. Secondly, unoriginal work may arise from the remix. Remix involve the incorporation of paraphrased works derived from several sources. The work seems original, but in actual sense, it is plagiarized (Pecorari, 2013).

Another form of plagiarism results from the recycle error. In the case of recycle, a writer includes information from previous works but fail to provide citations. The work is therefore considered unoriginal. Fourthly, there is the issue of hybrid. The kind of plagiarism that is seen as hybrid results from the failure to give citations for the copied passages (Pennycook, 2012). Unlike in recycle, here, a writer provides excellent ideas from various cited works but includes some passages which are not cited.  Fifth is the mash-up plagiarism. In Mashup plagiarism, a writer gets information from various sources, but none of the sources are cited (Pennycook, 2012). The practice thus results to very high percentage of plagiarism.

 In addition, the plagiarism spectrum also lists aggregator as another uncommon form of plagiarism. In this case, a writer provides the sources and even gives proper citation. Nonetheless, the work does not exhibit any form of the writer's originality.  The seventh form of plagiarism is commonly known as 404 error. The 404 error occurs when citations are given for incorrect information or non-existing information about a given source (Clough, 2013). In this case, Clough (2013) argue that the writer picks any source and cites anywhere in work. It is thus obvious that there will be no correlation between the citation and the information being cited.  Finally, the re-tweet plagiarism error also occurs when one provides a citation that depicts a lot of similarity in structure and wording as the original text.

 Hybrid plagiarism was once noted in some work where some information required citation, but it was omitted unintentionally. One way through which hybrid plagiarism can be avoided is by providing proper paraphrasing and giving the correct citation. In an instance where two sources agree on some point, it is necessary to provide the correct citation from both sources. However, citing two or more sources in the single set of information must follow the correct format depending on the referencing style recommended for that particular task.

References

Clough, P. (2013). Old and new challenges in automatic plagiarism detection. In National Plagiarism Advisory Service, 2003.

Lathrop, A., & Foss, K. (2015). Student cheating and plagiarism in the Internet era. A wake-up

call. Libraries Unlimited, Englewood, CO 80155-6633.

Pecorari, D. (2013). Good and original: Plagiarism and patchwriting in academic second-language writing. Journal of second language writing, 12(4), 317-345.

Pennycook, A. (2012). Borrowing Others’ Words: Text, Ownership, Memory, and Plagiarism. Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning Across Languages and Cultures, 265.