Plagiarism: What It Is, and How To Avoid It

Plagiarism is very poorly understood by almost all lay people and by far too many trained authors, academics, and educators. Plagiarism has unfortunately ruined more than a few promising academic careers. But what exactly is plagiarism, and how does one avoid it?

One of the world’s oldest and leading universities, the University of Oxford in the UK, defines plagiarism as

Presenting work or ideas from another source as your own, with or without consent of the original author, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement. All published and unpublished material, whether in manuscript, printed or electronic form, is covered under this definition.

But what does “incorporating it into your own work without full acknowledgement” mean? Let’s look at a few illustrative examples drawn from real life.

Example 1: High school student A has to write a report on Martin Luther King. So they go to Wikipedia and use the Copy function on their computer to copy and paste a single paragraph from the Wikipedia article to their report. They do not include anything in their report indicating the source of the paragraph, but the teacher is able to do a simple online search using the suspect paragraph as the search term. They find that it matches the Wikipedia article word for word.

Is that plagiarism?

Yes, definitely. Some other person originally wrote the text of that Wikipedia article, but Wikipedia does not identify authors of articles. It is plagiarism to copy large quantities of text without explicitly identifying your source, even if the original author is anonymous.

To avoid being accused of plagiarism, the student could have simply added “according to Wikipedia” and then place the entire copied text in quotation marks. Problem solved!

Example 2: University instructor B copies a work of art in its entirety, uses the “Mirror” function in his imaging software to reverse it, then publishes it as his own entirely original work of art.

Is that plagiarism?

Yes. Simply reversing or mirroring the image is not sufficient to escape an accusation of plagiarism. The original creator of the work must be explicitly identified in the new publication. And it is also a copyright violation. To avoid a copyright violation, the image must be “significantly altered.” Mirroring is not a significant alteration.

Example 3: Author C does ‘research’ by reading websites created by other authors, sees an entirely new idea described on one of those websites, copies that material, but changes the wording slightly when reproducing it on their own website and claiming that they “looked at the same evidence, developed the same interpretation, and drew the same conclusions” as did the original author.

Is that plagiarism?

Yes. Ideas can be plagiarized, just as sentences and paragraphs can. In academia, ‘first to publish’ gets the credit. Being the second person to have an idea does not count. When academics and legitimate scholars embark on a research project, the first thing they are supposed to do is a ‘review of the literature,’ or a search of everything previously published on their chosen topic. Such searches were a huge headache in the era before computers and subject-specific databases, but now they are a breeze. Failure to do that review, or to do a sufficiently thorough review, can cause the researcher to commit plagiarism without meaning to do so.

Plagiarism does not have to be deliberate; it can also be accidental or inadvertent. In the real-life example of Author C, their plagiarism was deliberate, though it may have been the result of that author’s very poor understanding of what constitutes plagiarism.

So how do you avoid committing plagiarism or even being accused of it? The simple answer is to cite your sources, always. If you do not know how to construct a proper footnote or endnote, consult The Chicago Manual of Style or the Modern Language Association Style Manual. Both are usually available in every university library, many high school libraries, and some public libraries.

Alternatively, you can take a more obvious route by including a phrase within the main body of your text that identifies the original source. Example:

In his article on the birthplace of Jane Grey Dudley posted on SomeGreyMatter.com, J. Stephan Edwards says, “Neither Bradgate House nor Dorset House stand up to scrutiny as the location of Jane’s birth.”

Problem solved! The original author is properly identified, as is the original source for the information. And the information itself is placed in quotation marks to identify it as the original author’s own words. And for those of you writing reports of an assigned length, such as “1500 words minimum,” you have just increased your word count! Two birds, one stone!

As another example, and one conveniently drawn from within this article itself, I wanted to use specifically Oxford University’s definition of plagiarism. To avoid committing plagiarism, I provided an embedded hyperlink to the original source. That, too, is a valid method to avoid committing plagiarism, and it is particularly easy to use when creating webpages!

As a final observation, I will note that editors and publishers of the works of others too often edit authors’ manuscripts prior to publication in ways that can create the impression of plagiarism by the author. This issue occurs primarily with the so-called ‘trade presses,’ or publishers who accept manuscripts for publication without first submitting them for review by qualified experts in the subject or field discussed in the manuscript. I have found this to be a particular problem with popular publishers of history and biography, especially those publishers who value quantity (money) over quality. Too many non-academic publishers of history are far too keen to cut printing costs by eliminating large quantities of footnotes, endnotes, and other citations on the grounds that they are ‘not really necessary’ or ‘no one will ever read them anyway.’ And in the end, the authors are the ones who end up bearing the full brunt of accusations of plagiarism when it should actually be the editor or publisher.

Avoid being accused of plagiarism by learning what it is, always cite your sources in full, and if you are lucky enough to have your work published, insist that your editor and/or publisher leave your footnotes or endnotes fully intact!

J. Stephan Edwards, PhD
Palm Springs, California
3 July 2024