What Is Plagiarism Exactly? Research Paper Example

Plagiarism is basically the stealing of someone else’s original work or words and using them as one’s own.  Many individuals can find themselves in the court room because of a plagiarism lawsuit, where individuals could have avoided it all if they had properly cited or given credit to the original source.  Avoiding plagiarism is very simple – cite the source that the original idea, statement or phrase was borrowed from.  There is nothing wrong with giving credit to another author for his or her work, in fact it can help legitimize the argument and give credit to your work and research.  Unfortunately, students fail to recognize when they have committed plagiarism or are too lazy to properly give credit where credit is due.  This is very clear in two sentences within our example of a student attempting to borrow ideas of an original author.

The first instance of plagiarism in our example begins with the student’s line “But it is hard to know if a conflict of interest between doctors, researchers, and the drug company stockholders has tainted the results.”  This quote has been altered a little from the original source, but it still maintains the same idea that was the original author’s work.  The original quote was “…it is very difficult to discover and virtually impossible to prove that a piece of biomedical research has been tainted by conflict of interest.”  By simply rewording this phrase the student attempted to avoid having to place a citation on another author’s work and idea.  It does not matter if the entire phrase, sentence, or idea is used word-for-word; any borrowing of another person’s work needs to be cited to avoid strong penalties.

The last instance of plagiarism came with the student’s sentence “Biomedical researchers incorporate strict rules of science into their work, which is examined by peers.”  This quotation also borrows the exact work of the original author.  This information comes from the original work that stated that “Although biomedical research incorporates rigorous scientific rules and is often critically scrutinized by peers, the information can nevertheless be warped…”  Again, the student commits plagiarism by attempting to reword the original author’s work and failing to properly cite the resource that he or she borrow it from.  It is sometimes very easy to tell that a person has committed plagiarism because there is often a change in the person’s tone or use of vocabulary.  Perhaps and idea is used that is also very rare for that individual to come to such an insightful conclusion.  These are just a few of the tell-tale signs that plagiarism may have occurred.