Plagiarism is the practice of using words or ideas established by other authors and researchers unethically without proper consent and acknowledgment. It may be intentional or unintentional but is regarded as a  form of academic dishonesty and represented as a grave intellectual offense. Resorting to plagiarism can lead to negative consequences such as paper rejections and affect the author’s credibility and reputation. Let’s discuss more on how to avoid plagiarism.

How to avoid plagiarism while working on research articles?

1.Reading and Understanding

The first and foremost approach for writing a research paper devoid of plagiarism is to read a variety of sources that provide the information you are looking for and understand the basics of what you are going to write. Start by giving yourself sufficient time to go through the previous works published by various researchers and pay attention to all the required information.

2.Effective Tracking of Your Source

Students commit plagiarism because they bypass tracking various websites they visit. Also, they don’t keep their notes organized based on the information collected from the reference sources. This leads to various types of plagiarism. Different types are as follows:

• Direct Plagiarism 

This is the most basic type of plagiarism that occurs when you copy the exact words and sentences put forward by other authors in their already published articles. 

• Mosaic Plagiarism

This involves combining texts and ideas by getting information from different sources and incorporating them into your work without  citing or providing proper credits to the authors. 

• Paraphrasing Plagiarism

Paraphrasing plagiarism is the practice of improper paraphrasing of words and concepts, such as presenting an author’s work without citation or introducing only minor changes to the source.

• Self Plagiarism 

An author is said to be resorting to self-plagiarism if he uses his own past publications in his new research works without citing them properly. 

All types of plagiarism can be avoided by compiling your list of cited sources and updating them in the right citation order.

3.Avoid Copy-pasting

One of the simple ways of resorting to plagiarism is the action of copying and pasting or paraphrasing the content from a certain website. Copying information from the internet is the basic act of stealing someone else’s ideas and putting them as our own. You can prevent this by reading the topic carefully, doing research by going through several articles based on the topic, understanding the topic completely, getting an idea about the points to cover, and writing them in your own way. 

You can also avoid copy-pasting and ask for help from prominent mentors such as teachers in your educational institution or custom writers with years of experience in writing unique articles.

4.Using Quotations

Quoting is the way of depicting an author’s idea without changing their words, such as definitions or statements. It represents others’ ideas in your research and gives them the necessary credit.

How to avoid plagiarism while using quotations

• Use quotations when you feel the exact meaning of the source cannot be represented if rewritten differently.
• Also, use quotations for representing a concept’s definition or impactful statements.
• Use quotations if you feel like maintaining the integrity and authority of the author.

 5.Citing True Sources

Another way of avoiding the unethical practice and the misconduct of plagiarism is by citing your references. Words that you have taken from other authors need to be cited. Cite the sources when you provide scientific evidence established by another author who has carried out the research previously. Illustrating well-known facts and sharing common knowledge need not be cited.

6.Using Plagiarism Checker Tools

Most academic universities and educational institutes possess premium subscribed versions of plagiarism checkers to detect and identify potential levels of plagiarism. There are several free plagiarism checking tools available on the internet too. Students and researchers can check their work by scanning their detailed documents using online plagiarism checker tools, running it for comparison with a wide database of web pages and publications, and finally completing the scan by presenting the level of uniqueness of the paper. 

The plagiarized texts appear highlighted along with the generated source links of the original version. Plagiarism checking tools can help you identify any grammatical errors, misplaced citations, missing quotation marks, and paraphrased sentences that are very similar to the source.

In a Nutshell

The various ways to avoid plagiarism and how to not plagiarize your research work have been explained above. Plagiarism may tend to occur even after thorough and vigilant research, but all steps need to be followed to achieve your goal of providing high-quality and unique research work. 

By reading various articles, tracking your source, writing your research paper properly, using primary quotations, citing website sources, and scanning your work using plagiarism checkers, you can effectively present your research paper free of plagiarism and publish your insightful study in no time. Now that you have understood how to avoid plagiarism, you can easily work on writing unique research articles.