Overview of Terms: The Common Types of Plagiarism
“To plagiarize” comes from the Latin word “plagiare” which means, “to kidnap.” There are many ways to “kidnap” or steal ideas, both intentional and unintentional. As a member of an academic community that takes the sharing of ideas and information very seriously, it is important to avoid even the suspicion of plagiarism. To that end, it is your responsibility to learn how to cite your sources. It is also important to remember that understanding your materials is paramount to writing a good paper, and that plagiarizing reveals a lack of confidence in your own understanding. If you are ever tempted to kidnap someone else’s words or ideas – think again – and go to your professor for help.
A brief introduction can be found in a video, "Plagiarism Explained by Common Craft" at http://www.commoncraft.com/video/plagiarism.
There are different types and degrees of plagiarism. We've defined the most common types below and have provided links to examples.
Direct Plagiarism
Direct plagiarism is the word-for-word transcription of a section of someone else’s work without attribution. The deliberate plagiarism of someone else's work is unethical, academically dishonest, and grounds for disciplinary actions, including expulsion. See Citation Examples.
Self Plagiarism
Self-plagiarism occurs when a student submits his or her own previous work, or mixes parts of previous works, without permission from their instructor. For example, it would be unacceptable to incorporate part of a term paper you wrote in high school into a paper assigned in a college course. Self-plagiarism also applies to submitting the same piece of work for assignments in different classes without previous permission from the instructors.
Mosaic Plagiarism
Mosaic Plagiarism occurs when a student borrows phrases from a source without using quotation marks, or finds synonyms for the author’s language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original. Sometimes called “patch writing,” this kind of paraphrasing, whether intentional or not, is academically dishonest and punishable – even if you footnote your source! See Citation Examples.
Accidental Plagiarism
Accidental plagiarism occurs when a person neglects to cite their sources, or misquotes their sources, or unintentionally paraphrases a source by using similar words, groups of words, and/or sentence structure without attribution. (See example for mosaic plagiarism.) Students should learn how to cite their sources and to take careful and accurate notes when doing research. (See the Note-Taking section on the Academic Honesty page.) Cases of accidental plagiarism are taken seriously and they may be brought before a school’s judiciary board.
Word Switch Plagiarism
"If you take a sentence from a source and change around a few words, it is still plagiarism. If you want to quote a sentence, then you need to put it in quotation marks and cite the author and article. But quoting Source articles should only be done if what the quote says is particularly useful in the point you are trying to make in what you are writing. In the case below, a quotation would not be useful. The person who plagiarized in this example has just been too lazy to synthesize the ideas expressed in the Source article." (from C. Birnbaum, Plagiarism: A Student's Guide to Recognizing It and Avoiding It) See Citation Examples.
Style Plagiarism
"When you follow a Source Article sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph, it is plagiarism, even though none of your sentences are exactly like those in the source article or even in the same order. What you are copying in this case is the author's reasoning style." (from C. Birnbaum, above). See Citation Examples.
Idea Plagiarism
"If the author of the source article expresses a creative idea or suggests a solution to a problem, the idea or solution must be clearly attributed to the author. Students seem to have a hard time distinguishing author's ideas and/or solutions from public domain information. Public domain information is any idea or solution about which people in the field accept as general knowledge. For example, what a black hole is and how it is defined is general knowledge. You do not need to reference a general description of a black hole. The escape velocity of earth is also general knowledge and needs no reference. The distance to the center of the Galaxy is also general knowledge. However, a new idea about how to look for black holes or a new solution to a physics problem needs to be attributed to the authors. If you don't know what is accepted as public domain in a particular field, ASK." (from C. Birnbaum, above). See Citation Examples.
Paraphrasing v. Plagiarism
We can extend the notion of idea plagiarism, above, by considering the notion of paraphrasing. Paraphrasing restates a text using other words, and this can be a very effective manner of summarizing or simplifying material. Successfully paraphrasing is an acquired skill and poor paraphrasing on the part of a student is really a form of plagiarism. To avoid this trap, check out the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Principles of Paraphrasing: How to Avoid Inadvertent Plagiarism at http://isites.harvard.edu/paraphrasing