An Introduction To Plagiarism & How To Detect It

The internet is so easily available in this modern technological world and online stealing like ‘Plagiarism’ has become a very concerning thing for students and writers.

Many students and newbie writers do not even have a clear understanding of plagiarism and they somehow accidentally or unintentionally commit plagiarism and ultimately face its devastating consequences.

Many writers look for plagiarism detection methods to make their work plagiarism-free and save their careers and jobs because plagiarism is a straight crime in the writing industry.

Whether you are a student or a blogger who owns a blogging site, you must know that plagiarism is important and more important is to detect it accurately in your work.

So, in this post, we will provide you with an in-depth introduction to plagiarism and how you can detect it rightly.

So, stick to the very end of this post!

What is Plagiarism and Why Dealing With it is Important?

The term ‘Plagiarism’ is derived from the Latin word ‘Plagiarius’ though, there are many definitions available for the term ‘Plagiarism’ but simply plagiarism means stealing others’ words and ideas and presenting them with your name and identity.

Whether you use others’ work as yours intentionally or unintentionally, it is plagiarism and dealing with plagiarism is important to save yourself from its consequences.

If you copy the ideas of other authors or researchers and use them in your work without giving credit to the original authors, they can sue you and you can face lifetime jail with a heavy fine.

As a  writer or blogger, if you are publishing content on your website by stealing from the internet the chances are high that Google will penalize your site.

As a student, if you submit your assignments or research paper containing plagiarized content chances are you can get a straight ‘F’ in your grades, your academic and professional reputation will be destroyed and you might face legal issues for violating your institute’s anti-plagiarism policy.

Therefore, dealing with plagiarism is necessary for everyone.

Types of Plagiarism

Do you know that plagiarism is not of one kind?

Yes, plagiarism has many types and if you want to detect plagiarism accurately, you should be aware of all its types.

Below we will discuss a few promising types of plagiarism:

· Complete Plagiarism

The worst type of plagiarism is ‘Complete Plagiarism,’ as the name says, complete plagiarism is when you copy someone’s work completely whether it’s an article, idea, research work, or anything and you pass it off as its completely yours and you are the original author or a researcher.

This type of plagiarism is considered the most offensive and not less than intellectual theft.

· Direct Plagiarism

Do not confuse ‘Direct Plagiarism’ with ‘Complete Plagiarism’ though they are similar to some extent, in direct plagiarism, you copy a section or two of someone else’s work and pass it off as your own whereas, in ‘Complete Plagiarism’ you copy the complete thing and represent it with your name.

· Source-Based Plagiarism

This is another common type of plagiarism however, it is mostly committed by researchers and students.

Students are often asked to cite all the sources they used to write their assignments or other academic work and sometimes they cite the wrong sources which lead their work to ‘Source-Based Plagiarism.’

Researchers, when they work on their research work explore a lot of sources to write a better research paper and for supporting ideas and knowledge, sometimes they lost track of the sources they used and cite them incorrectly on the reference page and commit ‘Source-Based Plagiarism.’

· Self-Plagiarism

‘Self-Plagiarism’ is the type of plagiarism in which a person duplicates his own work. It’s a form of plagiarism that involves one’s own work.

It takes place when an author lifts phrases or sentences from his or her own published work and utilizes them elsewhere.

This sort of plagiarism is regularly detected in academic journals. Researchers may make re-use of their research work for another research effort, however, the percentage of re-usage must be appropriate to those specified by the publishing journals if they allow them to do so.

These are the most common and serious types of plagiarism, you need to understand these types so that you can detect plagiarism in your work rightly.

Let’s move toward the next section of this post!

Ways to Detect Plagiarism

If you are thinking ‘How to detect plagiarism’ here is how:

· Go for a Plagiarism Checker

The first and effortless way to check for plagiarism is through the use of online plagiarism checkers, most of these tools are available for free and for everyone. You can detect the most accurate percentage of plagiarism in your work using this online tool.

The online plagiarism checker is developed with AI technology, it takes user’s text and scans it completely. After scanning, the tool compared the input text with millions and trillions of sources available on the internet.

The whole comparing process takes a few seconds and if the tool catches any matching sentence or phrase of the input text with any online source, it highlights the plagiarized text and also lists the matching online source, isn’t it amazing?

The plagiarism detectors use a percentage format to show the plagiarized and unique percentage of content, this is how:

Go for a Plagiarism Checker

· Perform Google Search for Each Section

Another way to detect plagiarism is by performing a Google search for individual sections of your content, this method is suitable when you have doubts about a particular section or sentence of your document.

You can simply copy that section of your document, go to Google, paste the copied text on Google, and hit ‘Enter.’

To find an exact match, you can put double quotation marks at the start and end of that section, this way Google will turn up your search for those exact words.

Also, if Google lists the matched source you can bookmark that source, it will help you rewrite that section to make it plagiarism-free.

This way of detecting plagiarism is very simple and Google will not even ask you to pay any cost.

Wrap Up

Here’s a quick wrap-up to this post, we discussed an in-depth introduction to plagiarism so that students, writers, and every individual can make their heads clear about plagiarism.

We also discussed the free, fast, and effortless ways to detect plagiarism. Make sure you test both ways.

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