5 Common Types of Plagiarism and How to Avoid Them?

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5 Common Types of Plagiarism and How to Avoid Them? June 30, 2021

Plagiarism can be any piece of writing or work of art that is copied without the consent of the owner. It especially concerns academic publications, journals, or other such works of an author. Also, images are copied without proper acknowledgment to the source but it’s easy to detect. This wrongful appropriation not only hurts the author whose idea or thoughts has been copied but also hurts the entire academic institution.

Common Types of Plagiarism

It is very simple to copy content from few sites because of open availability over the internet. And then combine them to form one piece of writing. That’s why plagiarize someone’s work is not a difficult task to do. Plagiarism is usually categorized into five common types as follow:

1. Direct Plagiarism

The first one is when other work or opinion is copied exactly without giving any sort of acknowledgment to that author.  It’s a word-to-word copy of the content without using quotation marks and it’s totally unethical.

2. Paraphrasing Plagiarism

The second type is when the sequence of ideas, the material arrangement are copied without permission. It happens when you copy someone’s data or pattern and do some editions like rephrase words or changes in sentence structure. Many times students do a mistake, they change the title, and the rest of the content is the same. And imagine that they never find out that work has been copied. But there is strict constitutes plagiarism when content is going to live.

3. Self Plagiarism

Self-plagiarism is a term that means a person is trying to copying one’s old content and use it in the latest article or anything else. Auto plagiarism means that you rewrite your old content and submit it without the permission of all professors. It might be an article, a column, a paper, or research. Most of the authors feel that since it’s their own work, they can reuse it anyway and anywhere they want. Well, that’s not true.

4. Accidental Plagiarism

Another type of duplication is the accidental plagiarism, in which a person misquote a source with similar words or copy content unintentionally. However, it’s a mistake, negligence, or unintended paraphrasing but the consequences are the same as all plagiarism types.

5. Mosaic Plagiarism

Mosaic plagiarism also called patchwork plagiarism. It happens when someone copying content from many sites and regenerate material as their own. This practice may be intentional or unintentional but difficult to detect. But in every situation, you will be guilty of doing plagiarism.

How to Avoid Content Duplication?

Plagiarism in any form and type kills creativity. Scholars, professors are totally against this unethical behavior from students so, they always search for a perfect way to detect duplication. Also, plagiarism decrease website ranking because search engines such as Google and yahoo check out publish content for plagiarism. Thus, the huge database of these search engines is searched for finding out the relevant material. To avoid duplication you must understand some basic things as follow:

  • Use quotation mark
  • Create unique and original content
  • Credit to the original author
  • Check duplication before submission
  • Add references and citations