Plagiarism: Robbery in The Field of Intellectual Property

Since the Internet has become an important source of information and stores a substantial number of academic documents plagiarism has become a common problem, especially among students. Considering its diverse implications, including ethical issues, it should be tried to be detected and reduced. This paper addresses how it can be defined and classified. It also presents the diverse forms in which it can be committed, as well as some procedures to its detection. Furthermore, this article exposures some reasons that may explain its occurrence among students. In sum, this essay about plagiarism shows that it is an importantly extended problem with huge relevance that should be avoided mainly by teaching students and other academics about what it is, when it occurs and why it is important.

Plagiarism is an academic problem worldwide that involves the violation of intellectual property and which has important ethical implications. Considering the Internet has become a huge repository of information and resources which is easily accessible in developed countries, plagiarism is becoming more common, being usually visible among university students. It has been evidenced that plagiarism occurs at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and affects public and private higher institutions of education, large and small.

This essay tries to investigate why and how plagiarism can occur, presenting also some explanatory propositions. Besides, its ethical and academic implications will also be discussed.

What is plagiarism?

Plagiarism is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the “the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.” This term comes from the Latin word plagiarius, which literally means ‘kidnapper’. It consists on the attribution of others’ ideas and propositions to oneself, which would be corresponded with their theft or kidnapping.

Although the use of the Internet has facilitated plagiarism to become more widespread, it is not a new issue. The university is one of the contexts in which plagiarism is more prevalent, especially considering the extended use of the web by students, faculty and researchers alike. Different studies have obtained diverse results with regard to its incidence, as they differ in their focus (some investigations examine cheating in general whereas others are centred in plagiarism) and methodology (different conceptualizations and measures have been considered). As a consequence, a conclusive and general estimation cannot be presented.

As it has been just mentioned, plagiarism can be conceptualized under different propositions, so different classifications can be considered. One of the simpler ones is a division in two types: intentional and unintentional (Park, 2003). Considering this separation, different causes can be attributable to plagiarism, bearing in mind that determining or proving the intent behind the action is quite tough. When plagiarism occurs with intent, there is a premeditated and designed decision to present other authors’ ideas as our own, thus committing a deliberate act of literary theft (Park, 2003). However, in some cases the individual does not commit plagiarism with this intention. In these cases, the lack of acknowledgement regarding the use and management of citations is what leads to plagiarism. Having difficulties in differentiating between common knowledge and information that should be referenced or a lack of information about the protocol for referring materials may result in plagiarism.

This later proposition has been evidenced by diverse studies, like the one conducted by Roig (1997), who suggested that plagiarism may be a matter of ignorance or poor skills, rather than a purposeful behavior. This author aimed to assess the degree of understating of plagiarism that colleague students have. For this purpose, he carried out two studies in which undergraduates were presented with an original paragraph and different rewritten versions of it. Some of these versions were plagiarized (e.g. superficially modified), whereas other were properly paraphrased. Students were tested for their ability to distinguish the plagiarized versions from the ones correctly paraphrased. The percentage of students that correctly identified the paraphrased versions was around 74%. However, some of the plagiarized versions were not identified by almost half of the participants. These results were explained by considering that students did not know exactly what constitutes plagiarism and how they can correctly paraphrase a given text or sentence.

Regarding the aforementioned differentiation between intentional and unintentional plagiarism, cultural differences should be considered. Nowadays, so many undergraduate students, especially those studying abroad, are receiving their studies in a language different from their mother tongue, generally in English. This situation makes writing formal papers or essays harder for them. They usually do not feel confident about their ability to express their ideas in English (or other languages) or they are not familiar with paraphrasing or referencing.

Despite the different conceptualizations that can be done, some authors have suggested students plagiarise in four main ways:

• Presenting information from another source as their own.
• Submitting a paper written by someone else and presenting it as their own.
• Coping information literally from a text and referencing it, but without including quotation marks (as a consequence, this information will seem paraphrased instead of directly quoted).
• Paraphrasing material from other texts without referencing its source.

Causes

Considering that plagiarism is a common issue among scholars and it may have significant consequences, a question arises in mind: why do individuals commit plagiarism? This topic has been studied mainly in students. From their perspective, they have usually alleged reasons like increased competitiveness and pressure to get good marks, lack of time to complete the tasks, but also other motives as laziness or the easiness to acquire information through the Internet (Perk, 2003). Other authors, as Núñez (2005), have identified other reasons, such as a lack of research and citation skills, lack of understanding about what plagiarism and copyright are, or pressure by other students that also commit plagiarism. Leaving the students’ opinion aside, one possible cause for plagiarism is the methodology used by professors or lecturers, as well as the type of assignments they ask for.

Regarding the question about why people commit plagiarism, we could think about a “student profile” who is likely to commit it. Research has shown that some factors can be related to the incidence of plagiarism, such as procrastination, anxiety concerning marks, morality or discipline of study. Other determinants that may also be involved are age and maturity, gender, academic ability, peer disapproval or risk of being caught. However, several studies have shown that the profile of a typical student who plagiarizes is difficult to define.

Detection

Once the notion of plagiarism has been defined and described, as well as the potential explanatory causes for it, we should focus on how it can be detected. Regarding manual plagiarism, different procedures are followed depending on the number of texts that have been plagiarised. When it occurs within a single text, its detection is mainly based in the recognition of inconsistences, such as the author’s writing style (Clough, 2003). When it happens with multiple texts, what basically occurs is that some similarities between various sources -that may be difficult to explain by mere coincidence- are found. Once this situation is noticed, the goal is to look for the sources from which the information has been obtained. The effectiveness of this kind of procedures relies on the knowledge, ability and effort of the reviewer for detecting such inconsistencies, as well as on his or her knowledge about the content of the article or essay which is being reviewed. For this reason, technological advancements of recent decades have importantly contributed to this purpose. Universities in the USA, the UK or Canada have developed software and diverse technological tools for plagiarism detection. They operate by comparing the papers’ content with a stored database of literature or with content from the Internet. Although the use of these tools is easy, quick and rather widespread among universities as well as other institutions, some problems have been identified. First of all, they require from huge space for storage. Second, they can be bypassed by students once they become aware of their action and how they work. Third, the increasing number of data sources in the Internet make their use and applicability much more complicated.

Ethical and academical importance

Despite all the technical considerations reviewed, ethical and academical implications should also be discussed. As the information reported suggests, the creative and original status of the authors are important, needing to be recognized for a wide variety of reasons, including social, intellectual, economic and moral.

Broadly speaking, from an ethical point of view, plagiarism is a subcategory of a major category named as “academic dishonesty” (Howard, 2000), being an inadaptable behavior. It entails the appropriation of other individuals’ work, which in the end would be comparable to committing a theft. The original authors have employed time, resources and effort in developing and constructing their ideas and results, so presenting their conclusions or propositions as our own is an important ethical violation. In other words, it would represent an academic fraud. In addition, committing plagiarism damages the professional qualification of the person who is doing it and decreases his or her competence.

At the same time, it is interesting to point out that some authors consider that plagiarism is not an issue. Such authors believe our society is naturally collective, so they tend to think that no one can make anything without nurturing from prior work from other people. In this way, every time an author is presenting a new work, he or she is ineludibly relying on prior ideas of other authors or even other civilizations. In extent, they claim that notions as originality, ownership or intellectual property belong only to the system of capitalist individualism.

Conclusion

This essay about plagiarism has discussed what it is, when it occurs and why it is important. Scientific knowledge is growing exponentially nowadays, becoming more and more widespread. The accessibility to papers and articles is increasing too. For these reasons, the importance of the topic reviewed is high, especially among students. Therefore, it is necessary to think about how it can be reduced or tackled, rather than focusing on how to punish it. If plagiarism is reduced, punishments will not be necessary. The main way of assuring this illegality is not committed is through specific acknowledgement. Students should know how to make an appropriate use of this information, handling it with the respect and integrity that authors deserve. They should be provided with information about the concept of plagiarism, how it can be committed and why it is relevant. All of these will minimize the occurrence of intentional and unintentional plagiarism.