Do you know what plagiarism is? Are you thinking to yourself, plagiar-what? Is that some sort of disease? (Uh-oh, said the editor.) If you aren’t familiar with the term plagiarism, read this post—it may save your career.
What is plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the unattributed use of someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas, and concepts (Plagiarism.org, 2014). You can call it borrowing, but essentially, plagiarism is stealing. Specifically, to plagiarize means
- to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
- to use (another’s production) without crediting the source
- to commit literary theft
- to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source. (Merriam Webster online, n.d.)
In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward. Whatever you borrowed, if you don’t say clearly who you borrowed it from and provide a usable link or reference back to the original source, you run the risk of being accused of plagiarism, which can get you expelled from your doctoral program. Yep. Expelled. Kind of a big deal.
Examples of plagiarism
- Turning in someone else’s work as your own
- Copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
- Failing to put a quotation in quotation marks or “cherrypicking” parts of a quotation, taking the words out of context
- Giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
- Changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
- Copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not
How plagiarism happens
Plagiarism happens. Usually it is unintentional. Think about this scenario and tell me it hasn’t happened to you: In rabid researcher mode, you comb through multiple databases, download hundreds of articles, follow umpteen threads on Google Scholar, dig into Ebrary and Google Books … you suck up information like a kid with a milkshake, gloating with glee when you find some particularly juicy or seminal article that some kind soul uploaded to the Web so you didn’t have to fork out a fortune to buy the book. Yum.
You copy, paste, and paraphrase text and ideas into your paper, immersed in your quest, relishing your progress. After a few hours of happy hunting, it suddenly dawns on you that you haven’t been citing your sources. In fact, you haven’t even kept track of where you found some of those obscure articles. Were they in a database? Did you get there through EBSCOHost or ProQuest? Or was it an article on a publisher’s website? Argh! Curses!
Now you are at a crossroads. You have two choices. One is long, tedious, boring, and frustrating; the other is short and relatively painless, but could lead to some serious consequences later, if anyone found out what you did. I am sure you know I’m talking about plagiarism.
Why dissertators feel tempted to cheat
The right thing to do
The right thing to do is to go back through your process, find all those sources you accessed, and record the citation information carefully, completely, and accurately, making sure to include robust URLs and dois (digital object identifers) and avoiding university proxies that no one but you or your fellow classmates can access. And then, next time you go searching for sources, you vow to keep track as you go along, like the responsible scholar you are. Right? Then you cite your sources in your paper like a citation maniac! (I tend to follow the maxim of when in doubt, cite. I figure it is better to CYA (cover your ass) than get in trouble for plagiarism later.)
The wrong thing to do
The wrong thing to do is failing to include citations in your paper, or perhaps worse, making up citations that might or might not relate to the words you paraphrased, hoping that no one will check.
As an editor, I don’t consider it my job to make sure your citations are accurate in terms of content. I check format, but as far as content goes, I have to trust your scholarly integrity. However, when I edit paragraph after paragraph of content with nary a citation, or maybe with one citation at the end of the paragraph, my plagiarism antenna pokes out of my head, and I start sniffing around for more signs of trouble. I go through the references and check that (a) they exist, (b) they are accurate, and (c) they are reasonably accessible to a typical reader.
Most of you know that when you include direct quotations, you must include the page number of the content. This is so readers can find the quote and read more about the subject. Reviewers can check to see if you took someone’s words out of context. It happens occasionally that dissertators either misinterpret or outright butcher someone else’s thoughts in their efforts to paraphrase. I don’t check your sources to make sure you paraphrased them accurately. However, if I spot a quotation that is not cited, I will try to find the page number. If I happen to notice that your interpretation of the authors’ words was taken out of context and spun to suit your argument, I will leave you a polite comment in the margin of your paper, warning you about the dangers of plagiarism.
Excuses for plagiarism
Sometimes plagiarism is intentional, but I believe dissertators rarely do it with malicious intent. When you are tired and the deadline is near, the effort to find citation information can be overwhelmed by the desire to get the paper done and submitted. Good enough is good enough for now; perfection can come later. Am I right? Ah, the slippery slope.
If you build good writing and research habits early in your academic career, it will be easier for you when the deadlines are clamoring and the pressure to cut corners is intense.
I don’t usually interact with the dissertators whose papers I edit. However, I was a teacher at a career college for 10 years. I’ve heard many excuses for why students feel compelled to plagiarize. Here are a few:
I tried (unskillfully) to put it into my own words.
Hey, no shame. We aren’t born with writing skills. We have to acquire them through practice. Learning how to write well is not like shopping for a toaster at Wal-Mart (darn). Academic writing is challenging even for good writers. Read lots of articles and dissertations to learn how other writers paraphrase and cite.
I forgot to copy the source.
It takes some practice to develop a system for managing your source information so you can create your citations. Read some tips in REASON 22 in my book. Make this system your habit. It is a lot easier to manage your sources as you go along, rather than wait until the end to figure out which source applies to which bit of text in your paper.
I didn’t know it was wrong.
It seems like everything on the Internet is free. We download movies and music. We copy pictures and text. We forward stories and webpages to our friends, we post them on Facebook. What we may not know is that many things on the Internet are considered “intellectual property.” That means it belongs to someone else, not to us. We are stealing!
Consequences of plagiarism
Plagiarism has consequences. If you’ve done it before, you might feel like you dodged a bullet. You might say, never again! Or you might say, I got away with it once, I probably can again. Ask yourself:
- Will I likely get caught?
- What are the potential consequences if I get caught?
- Who do I harm?
- Can I live with myself?
Only you can decide. However, plagiarizing your dissertation can come back to haunt you years after you did the crime. Here are two examples to nudge you in the right direction:
- In Germany, defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was forced to resign when it was discovered he had plagiarized large parts of his thesis; his university stripped him of his doctorate (Pidd, 2011).
- In 2013, German education minister Annette Schavan lost her doctorate when it was discovered she had failed to properly cite other researchers’ work in her dissertation (Brumfield, 2013).
I’m pretty sure plagiarism isn’t unique to German scholars. Imagine working so hard for so many years to earn your doctorate, only to have it stripped from you. All that time and money down the drain. Think about that before you decide to cut corners on citing your sources.
If you want to earn the title of scholar, you need to do your best to follow the academic rules of the road. Writing a dissertation may be one of the hardest things you will ever do. The value of your work is diminished in direct proportion to the level of disregard you have for properly citing your sources. That was a convoluted sentence, wasn’t it? Let me put it this way: Cheaters may gain in the short run, but the honorable dissertator wins out in the end.
Check out plagiarism.org [http://www.plagiarism.org/] for lots of information about plagiarism, presented by WriteCheck, a service designed to help scholarly writers avoid plagiarism.
Sources
Brumfield, B. (2013, February 6). German education minister loses Ph.D. over plagiarized thesis. CNN. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/06/world/europe/german-minister-plagiarism/
Merriam Webster. (n.d.). Plagiarism. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plagiarize
Pidd, H. (2011). German defence minister resigns in PhD plagiarism row: Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had been stripped of doctorate by University of Bayreuth. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/01/german-defence-minister-resigns-plagiarism
Plagiarism.org. (2014). What is plagiarism? Retrieved from http://www.plagiarism.org/plagiarism-101/what-is-plagiarism
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