8.0 What Is Plagiarism and What Do We Do About It?

Module 8

Plagiarism 

Plagiarism is the Cardinal Sin in academic writing, the one crime where capital punishment is often meted out, at least in the US and other advanced democracies. For example, in 2011, the German Minister of Defense and in 2013, the German Minister of Education had to resign over issues of plagiarism in their respective PhD theses.

In legal writing, we can identify the following four main cases in which an author has to give credit to the original author or creator of a text, argument, idea, illustration, or other piece of information, namely when

  • using another person’s actual words;
  • paraphrasing another person’s words;
  • using another person’s ideas or arguments;
  • using facts, statistics, graphs, pictures, illustrations, or other material that is not in the public domain and/or common knowledge.

In essence, plagiarism is the appropriation of somebody else’s ideas, arguments, or expressions and passing them off as one’s one, in particular by not identifying them clearly as the intellectual property of the original creator. Plagiarism.org, a website dedicated to the problem, makes it quite clear that words like “copying” or let alone “borrowing” “can disguise the seriousness of the offense” and that “plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward.”

One could say that there are two types of plagiarism: First, the conscious and deliberate stealing of somebody else’s work and the fraudulent submission of this work as one’s own. This occurs, in extreme cases, when a student submits somebody else’s paper and merely replaces his or her name instead of the original author’s. Less extreme but equally fraudulent cases involve the copying of parts of somebody else’s work, one or more chapters, one or more pages, or one or more paragraphs, without the required “quotation marks” and references that clearly mark the appropriated passages and where they are from.

We will spend no further time on the first form of plagiarism because the problem and the consequences should be obvious to everybody.

The problem we have to work with and understand is the second form of plagiarism, where an author is too much influenced by the sources he or she has read, and expressions, parts of sentences, and sometimes the better parts of entire paragraphs kind of jump from the source into the keyboard without the student intending to commit plagiarism. The problem is that this second form will be equally punished in most instances because we assume that the author should have known better and should have paid more attention to giving credit to the original creator of the expressions, ideas and arguments.

Nota bene, in particular in the day and age of social media and ubiquitous exposure to multimedia, the appropriation of data, graphs, images, video or sound files, without permission and proper citation, is plagiarism in the same way as the copying of printed text.

At McKinney, we require every paper and theses to be accompanied by the following honor statement:

“I hereby solemnly declare that I have written this thesis or note by myself and without unauthorized support from any other person or source, that I have used only the materials and sources indicated in the footnotes and in the bibliography, that I have actually used all the materials listed therein, that I have cited all sources, written or electronic, from which I have drawn intellectual input in any form whatsoever, and placed in quotation marks all words, phrases or passages taken from such sources verbatim which are not in common use and that neither I myself nor any other person has submitted this paper in the present or a similar version to any other institution for a degree or for publication.”

DO NOT SIGN THIS LIGHTHEARTEDLY AND DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE CONSEQUENCES OF PLAGIARISM, REGARDLESS OF THIS STATEMENT! FOR EXAMPLE, YOU MAY NEVER BE ELIGIBLE TO TAKE THE BAR IF YOU HAVE PLAGIARIZED A PAPER! EDUCATE YOURSELF NOW ABOUT THE ISSUE!

Click Next to enroll in the mini-course by Prof. Alison Martin on Plagiarism and complete the assignments and quizzes there!