Plagiarism is the act of presenting someone else's work, ideas, or expressions as one's own without proper attribution. This includes:
- Copying text verbatim without quotation marks and citations
- Paraphrasing without citation
- Using ideas, concepts, or structures without acknowledging the source
Types of Plagiarism
- Global plagiarism: passing off an entire text by someone else as your own work. Example: Taking a friend's paper, changing the name at the top to your own, and turning it in.
- Verbatim plagiarism: directly copying someone else’s words. Example: Copying paragraphs, or even sentences, from an article and pasting them into your paper without including a citation.
- Paraphrasing plagiarism: rephrasing someone else’s ideas to present them as your own. Example: Taking a unique concept from a book, building an argument around that concept, and using that as part of your paper.
- Patchwork plagiarism: stitching together parts of different sources to create your text. Example: Taking part of a sentence from source A and part of a sentence from source B, making those two parts fit together into a new sentence and not giving credit to either source.
- Self-plagiarism: recycling your own past work. Example: Using any part of anything you have written before for a new project. If you reuse any of your work, you must cite yourself.
How AI can lead to unintentional plagiarism
- Overreliance on AI-generated content without critical evaluation
- Difficulty in determining the originality of AI-generated text
- Blurred lines between assistance and authorship when using AI tools
