How Can Plagiarism Occur?

There are many ways plagiarism can occur, and it’s not always as simple as copying and pasting without attribution. Here are some examples of unintentional plagiarism:

• Quoting someone without using quotation marks.
• Using an incorrect source when acknowledging other people’s ideas.
• Changing a few words around in someone else’s sentences and claiming them as your own.
• Using too many ideas, quotes, and sentences in your work from a single source to the point where it becomes a replication of these ideas (even if you properly cite this single source).

Common Misconceptions About Plagiarism

Most people agree that plagiarism is unethical, but they may be unaware of some common misconceptions that surround this topic.

As outlined in the bulleted list above, plagiarism can occur unintentionally in many ways. While plagiarism can be unintentional, lack of intent is not a valid defense against accusations of plagiarism. This is why it’s so important to remain vigilant and carefully scan your work for any issues.

Another common misconception about plagiarism involves copying your own work. It can be tempting to copy and paste portions of content that you have already published, especially if you’re writing many similar documents. However, you still need to properly refer to your initial publication as the original source when repurposing it.

What Could Go Wrong?

What’s the worst that could happen if a company or its representative is caught with plagiarized content?

One of the most obvious consequences of plagiarism is the loss of one’s reputation. If large amounts of text were simply copied and pasted from another source, you may suddenly lose the trust of your audience. They may view your content with skepticism in the future, or they may stop listening to you altogether.

Plagiarism can also cause the end of people’s careers. For example, in May 2021, a public university president resigned because of a graduation commencement speech that contained plagiarized phrases from a well-known book. At a university where students and faculty are expected to produce original scholarship and properly attribute outside sources, this incident was obviously unacceptable.

Finally, there are potential legal consequences associated with plagiarism. According to copyright laws in the United States, original ideas are considered intellectual property. As long as these ideas are clearly recorded either digitally or in a book, they are protected by copyright laws. In serious instances of plagiarism, guilty parties may face copyright lawsuits.

Yet, often all it takes to avoid accusations of plagiarism is the proper acknowledgment that the ideas you are presenting were first presented by someone else.

Anti-Plagiarism Software Solution for your Enterprise

To avoid the consequences of plagiarism, you need to implement effective research, citing, and referencing processes to ensure all original sources and authors receive the proper credit. Thankfully, technology can help address this growing problem.

iThenticate is a plagiarism detection solution that makes it easy to protect your credibility and safeguard against potential plagiarism:

• You simply upload documents to iThenticate.
• The software compares your content to a vast content database, checking for matching sections, phrases, and sentence strings.
• Once the check is complete, the software generates a similarity report that highlights all text similarities between your content and existing sources in the database.
• You can make the necessary amendments to your content to avoid plagiarism.

Any document you upload will be checked against a database of more than 170 million publications and 91 billion web pages.

Thousands of academic journals around the world already use iThenticate, and it has successfully helped a wide range of organizations prevent plagiarism in written work. Organizations that already use iThenticate, include:

• The Center for Disease Control and Prevention
• The Environmental Protection Agency
• The European Parliament
• The National Institutes of Health
• Statistics Canada
• The United Nations

Try iThenticate Today

Using and implementing iThenticate is easy, and adding plagiarism checking to your workflow can provide you with genuine peace of mind. To learn more about how iThenticate can protect your organization’s reputation, schedule a demo today.

The post Why your Professional Reputation Benefits from Safeguarding Your Original Work appeared first on eWEEK.