What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is an act of using someone’s work or ideas, without giving credit to the original author, which can lead to severe consequences.

3 Tips to avoid plagiarism

1. Use such formatting styles like MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, etc. in order to add structure and credibility to your writing, and stay away from plagiarism.

2. Always cite the information when:

• You quote two or more words from a source verbatim;
• You introduce facts that you have found;
• You summarize ideas, conclusions and interpretations from the source;
• You use the structure of the other paper or the same set of arguments;
• You collaborate with other people while creating your paper;

3. Use citation machines that are available online to simplify the process of citing the information according to the specified formatting style, which can be troublesome. You can not only generate your “Works cited” page, but also receive a proper example of in-text citation.

Why is it important to give credit to the sources you have used?

By citing the information you add more value to your writing, as you show that you collected data from many reliable sources and can easily support your ideas. You protect yourself from being accused in plagiarism, as all the information used was properly cited. And the last but not the least, you help the reader to understand what sources were used, so they can go and read through them if needed.

Examples of plagiarism

It is evident that if you copy something from an article, book, or other source, paste it in your own paper and do not cite properly, you plagiarize. However, there exist a lot of forms of plagiarism. For instance, you can paraphrase, take only one or few ideas, copy style of the author, copy the sources, use information from an interview, translate something, etc., and if you don’t give credit to the source you have used, it means that your work is plagiarized, even though you may think it is not. Consequences of submitting plagiarized work are very serious, as it can result in suspension from college, getting fired from a job and even being sued by an original author.

Plagiarism detection software

There is a great variety of plagiarism detection software available on the web, which you can use to make sure that you deliver 100% original papers; however, please stay away from plagiarism detection programs which store the papers you submit, like Turnitin.com, as if you upload the paper to this website, it will no longer be considered unique and you will not be able to use it.