Plagiarism means publishing someone’s work as your own. Before 21 century, it was not easy to identify plagiarism. Now technology helps us design many tools like Turnitin or Grammarly; due to these tools, it becomes a matter of seconds to find plagiarism in articles, papers and dissertations. So it’s important that we understand the basic types of plagiarism and how to remove them. Sometimes it’s not always a researcher’s intent to go for plagiarism because researchers need to add literature review, quotes and studies in their paper as a reference. These are the situations we cannot avoid plagiarism.
This article will guide the reader about the most common types of plagiarism and methods to avoid it.
Types of plagiarism in masters dissertation:
For a researcher, plagiarism can be devastating, and there are many ways which we can use to avoid plagiarism easily. The most common types of plagiarism are:
Direct plagiarism
Dissertations are an important step in students’ journey. Moreover, if it’s a master’s dissertation, we must be very careful while writing it. Direct plagiarism is the most common form of plagiarism where the students and researchers pick up other researchers’ content intentionally and add it to their papers. This plagiarism can be harmful to researchers.
It’s important whenever you pick some content from other sources, cite it. Sometimes persons who copy content from others do not change a single word, not even punctuation marks. Software and tools available online easily detect this type of plagiarism. Moreover, some people copy content and change their synonyms; this type also comes under direct plagiarism. You can hire a dissertation writers uk to remove this plagiarism type.
Mosaic plagiarism:
In mosaic plagiarism, the writer does not intentionally add content. In this type of plagiarism, the writer may cite the sources of data he has added to his paper, but he does not put the content in quotation marks. So if you do not add the data in quotation marks but have cited the source, then it is called mosaic plagiarism, and the original author can file a case against you.
Paraphrasing someone’s work and not mentioning the source of it also comes under mosaic plagiarism. Most of the time, some writers try to be more genius and copy some words and paraphrase others. These are all kinds of mosaic plagiarism.
Self-plagiarism:
Self-plagiarism is a form of plagiarism where the writer recycles his work without referring to the source. No matter whether the research paper is published with his name, he cannot paraphrase his work if it’s a published paper. Moreover, he cannot use direct quotations and sentences from his work. The main reason behind this is that once a paper gets published, tools will detect this act as plagiarism. So it’s important to cite your work properly to avoid plagiarism in your master’s dissertation.
Accidental plagiarism:
Accidental plagiarism is another type of plagiarism in a master’s dissertation against which strict disciplinary actions can be taken. In accidental plagiarism, the plagiarist incorrectly quotes the different parts of others’ work.
Rephrasing others’ work is completely unethical behaviour. Always avoid such acts while writing a master’s dissertation.
Inaccurate authorship:
Mostly in research work, people who work on research work do not get credit for it. This is called inaccurate authorship. It can be defined in two ways. Firstly if a researcher works in research but does not get credit for his work. Secondly, if a researcher has worked on research but some other person gets the credit for this research work.
It’s important that if the researcher never gets the ownership of that paper, at least his work gets acknowledgement in the paper.
Complete plagiarism:
In this modern era where we have many tools and tricks to detect plagiarism, there are still people who steal others’ work and get it published by their name. This kind of plagiarism is stealing other persons’ intellectual rights. Victims can file a case against such plagiarism in court. This kind of plagiarism has a fixed penalty for the plagiarist.
Methods to avoid plagiarism
Cite your source:
Obviously, while writing a master’s dissertation and research papers, we must include researchers’ data. The best step is to cite your source properly. Source citation is a legal method, and the researcher does not get a plagiarism strike doing this.
You can see many online tutorials on YouTube and other sources on how to cite sources.
Rephrase sentences:
Another method to avoid plagiarism is to rephrase your content. Sometimes while writing research papers, we need to include the definition or explain different topics so that if some person reads the research paper, he first understands the previous studies so that he can easily understand the research work. In these situations, you can paraphrase the sentences. If you are a good writer, it will be easy for you to write your own words, and then you can easily avoid plagiarism.
Include quotations:
You will get a plagiarism strike if you have cited your source but do not put the sentences or content in quotations. So make sure you have added the content in quotation marks.
Plagiarism can be avoided very easily by rephrasing and citation. First, do not add someone’s content by just copying and pasting. You can rephrase it in your own words. If there comes a situation where you find a research work almost similar to your research work, then make sure you do not write the same sentences. In that case, you can rephrase your sentences, plus you can also cite the sentences.
Summary:
Plagiarism is not an ethical act, but no matter how well we have written, there comes some plagiarism in content. This is because while writing a master’s dissertation, we must include some content that belongs to some research paper. So we must understand the main types of plagiarism and how we can avoid them. There are many simple ways through which we can easily eliminate plagiarism, like rephrasing the sentences and defining proper source citations. Follow these methods to get rid of plagiarism in your master’s dissertation.
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