RJ Naguit: plagiarism

05 April 2010

School Tips: What is Plagiarism?

What is Plagiarism?

Most of us are guilty of this at one point in our student lives both maliciously or not. It may range from copying one's ideas directly, not citing a source, or it may also take the form of technically not just citing the source properly as in APA or any other standard format for citing your sources.

Just recently when I read about articles on plagiarism, I even said to myself, "Andami ko na palang nagaang plagiarism sa buhay ko." This thing with us college students is that we commit these violations because we are not aware of it. But again even our law states, "Ignorancia legis non excusat" - Ignorance from the law excuses no one.

So we, college students must be aware of what plagiarism is, how we commit it and most importantly, how to prevent it.

Plagiarism is the act of using other's work as your own.

According to Collegeuniversity.suite101.com, here are some actions that may be considered plagiarism:

Putting one's name on someone else's paper. This is the most obvious example. Whether it came from one of the many college essay plagiarism websties that buy and sell term papers or from a friend, this is plagiarism.
Putting one's name on someone else's phrases. One doesn't have to steal a whole paper for it to be plagiarism. Sometimes students get lazy and throw in a few paragraph or sentences from a book or website. If the original author is not credited for the writing, it's plagiarism.
Putting one's name on something that's paraphrased. A paraphrase is a rewording of a phrase, sentence, or paragraph that essentially says the same things. Paraphrases of someone else's work need to be cited just as a quote would. It's still someone else's idea, even if the words are changed.
Taking someone else's idea. This happens in academia sometimes. A graduate student has a great idea, and a professor steals it and writes a paper using the student's idea. Bad bad bad. It doesn't matter that words weren't stolen; it's the stealing of an idea that makes this a violation of intellectual property law.
"Recycling" your old material. Tweaking the contents of one assignment to meet the requirements of another assignment is both plagiarism and against college policies. (And professors talk to each other about their students' work, so don't try this!) There are some cases where a student wants to expand upon an idea from another paper in another class, and that's okay as long as you discuss this with the professor and get permission, and as long as it's truly an original work.
Failure to put a quote in quotations marks, or providing incorrect information about where a source came from. These are sloppy errors that are probably not malicious. But technically they are still plagiarism. Learning how to cite sources correctly is an important skill! if you do not know how to do this well, talk to a professor or your college writing center.

I also have found several free online Plagiarism detectors over the net which lets you compare your text to other pages of the web. One of which is www.articlechecker.com which allows you to paste your text and automatically finds similar phrases on other websites. I really recommend this one, I even found someone plagiarizing our research paper with this website.

Other free online plagiarism detectors include Tynt, Crossrefme, and Duplichecker.

Here are some tips to avoid plagiarism by eHow.com:

Determine if the information is common knowledge. If the information has been cited in five other sources, it's safe to assume that it's common knowledge and does not need citation.
Make quotations and citations your friend. If someone said those exact words, quote them and give them credit. Credit should also be given to artwork.
Quote professionals, but provide your unique opinion and viewpoint.
Do not copy and paste. This makes it easier for you to plagiarize. Instead read over the sentence a few times and try to put it into your own words.
Put quotations marks around words or phrases you do not want to change and credit the source.
Check your paraphrasing against the original text to make sure it is not the same.
Do not purchase essays. You do not know where they came from or if they are reliable.

There's such a thing as Plagiarism in the Philippines

Plagiarism according to Dictionary.com is "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."

Put simply, Plagiarism is the representation of one's work as your own. As such, it is a violation of the Intellectual Property Law and is considered illegal in most parts of the world.

As I was browsing my Facebook homepage, I saw Ms. Selenne Santiago's (my college English professor) status that read, " Not even one of the richest man in the Philippines can be spared from Plagiarism issues. Let this serve as a wake up call to all students who most especially do nothing, but cut and paste from the internet, or any print material. "

She was pertaining to Philippine business tycoon, Manuel Panglinan who delivered a plagiarized speech before the graduating batch of the Ateneo de Manila University's Schools of Humanities and Social Sciences during their graduation rites on March 27 and 26.

Reports from Inquirer.net also shared that parts of the speech came from copyrighted speeches by personalities such as US President Barack Obama, J.K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Conan O' Brien.

When I first read about this issue, I was quite surprised that there are really plagiarism issues in our country. I've always thought that these form of issues are somewhat taken lightly and are only taken seriously in other countries.In my experience, I recently uploaded my group's research paper in Filipino about student prostitues. As of my last log to Scribd.com, our document had 4000+ views and 350+ downloads. Sadly, we haven't received even just a single message of people asking permission to do use our work. I even caught someone who did a verbatim copy paste of our work (including the title)and the best part? He even uploaded in his blog. Plagiarism issues are all over the country, that is why Manuel Pangilinan's plagiarism issue would serve a concrete example of what the consequences of using other's work as your own.

Here's the link for the full article on Inquirer.net regarding the plagiarism controversy.

Although the Copy-Paste technique may be the easiest way to have your assignment/research paper, it won't benefit you in the long run. First, because you won't get as much learning as you would have if you did it your way. Second, Lady plagiarism will always be there to haunt you.