What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is a nebulous term. Originating from a root word that means stealing, or kidnapping, it has come to mean, putting it simply, "passing off someone else's work as one's own". The term usually applies to creative work in the arts and the sciences. Plagiarism involves an act of copying as well. Most debates around plagiarism have focused on students 'plagiarizing' in their assignments, but artists, poets, researchers, scientists-almost anybody could plagiaries. Using a significant amount of someone else's work without attribution also amounts to violation. As should be evident, the definition of 'significant amount' is again diffuse-how much is significant? If I quote two words from someone else's work without attributing/ acknowledging, does that make me a plagiarist? Summarizing or rephrasing someone else's work (again the question is of significant amount) without acknowledging the source too can amount to plagiarizing.

Plagiarism is different from copyright violation, or intellectual property right violation, for the simple reason that copyright lapses after certain time, and one can plagiaries work is not copyrighted too. The legal provisions are more for copyright/intellectual property right violation than for plagiarism as such, pushing plagiarism into the moral domain, rather than the legal domain. There is a coherent treatment of plagiarism from a legal point of view here. There are several definitions and treatments available, the one here specifically discusses plagiarism in higher education.

Why Are People Talking About Plagiarism?

It is evident that plagiarism is on the rise. With the ever increasing popularity of the Internet as a medium, there are many more documents available, and the software used for reading these documents have some editing functions which make it very easy to 'cut and paste' parts of a work. The access to documents on the Internet has become easier-especially in higher education (it's mostly free in most universities!). It is not surprising that many people are giving in to the temptation of cutting and pasting, without attribution or acknowledgement.

It is also not surprising that it is in higher education that we find the highest incidence. Students at that level are expected to write assignments, term papers quite frequently, and the reputations (and tenure!) of teachers depend as much on published writing as on their classroom performance. Both students are teachers are expected to display some originality in almost every piece of writing that they submit: students to their teachers, teachers to peers and evaluation and appointment committees, and as all know and understand that it is impossible to say something original in every piece that they write, every project that they undertake or analysis they produce.

As is well known (and therefore we say this without attribution or acknowledgement), there are services that offer pre-written, or custom-written essays and term papers, by one count, about a hundred. One can find most of them by searching for "term paper" through any major search engine. Termpapersites.com in fact is a kind of list of top/quality term paper sites.

On the other hand, there are services that detect plagiarism, especially term papers. Turnitin.com is possibly the best known. There are a few others as well.

In our next article, we shall look at some of these term paper sites, and their functioning in higher education.