How to avoid plagiarism in paper writing - (Dec/25/2007 )
What does Plagiarism actually means and how to avoid it while writing a research report . I want to avoid these mistakes in my work.
if you mention a result in your work, then you have to indicate that whether this is your finding or others finding. If you mention results reported by others without proper citation, this is Plagiarism. Before you report a finding of your research as a novel finding you have to make sure that it is not reported before. otherwise you will be acused of Plagiarism and your work will be rejected.
ok thats good. But tell me i am writing my report introduction or review of literature, if i will take some concept from some one review and write in own language and site his reference then its plagiarism or not. I mean i am not writing in my language not taking the whole written material of some other paper for my introduction, doe it is also plagiarism???
if you mention a result in your work, then you have to indicate that whether this is your finding or others finding. If you mention results reported by others without proper citation, this is Plagiarism. Before you report a finding of your research as a novel finding you have to make sure that it is not reported before. otherwise you will be acused of Plagiarism and your work will be rejected.
if you restate any info using your own words, you have to mention the original reference for that info, and no problem in this case
I know a real incident like this: a woman (our one time collaborator) rejected a manuscript, then used a significant portion of the introduction part of that manuscript (nearly copied, with some minor word changes) for her own paper on a similar type of work, but with a different system (She was the corresponding author, our PI and one student from the group were included as the co-authors for supplying her the materials). You can imagine how would the original authors react when they saw the paper when it was published. This has prompted a strong objection from the original authors to the journals' editor. At the end, a letter was sent to our PI asking for explanation. I don't know exactly what happened afterwards. I know the paper was not withdrawn, but she is no longer our collaborator anymore. She has since relocated to the US. This action would also qualify as plagiarism. Actually she was a lot worse than that.
Now you see these bastards do exist in this world.
While writing the introduction, you can use concepts from different reviews and write it in your own words. But be careful as to not change the interpretation of the citation. This can happen unintentionally, when non-english speakers (including me) and even rarely english speakers write something in their own words or may be the results of a particular paper is interpreted by writer (not entirely but some small tiny fact). Remember to have the citations properly stated as to avoid any confusion.
At the end have someone read it.
Good Luck !!!
if you take data from a published article or a manuscript which is accepted to publish, and do not quote your source;
while giving the citation, i am reading a review written by some one and he is interpreted the results of some one else and giving his citation, when i will take his written concept now i have to cite the reference he cite or his own name of review as citation as well should be there or not.
may be you understood me, its like cross reference
While writing the introduction, you can use concepts from different reviews and write it in your own words. But be careful as to not change the interpretation of the citation. This can happen unintentionally, when non-english speakers (including me) and even rarely english speakers write something in their own words or may be the results of a particular paper is interpreted by writer (not entirely but some small tiny fact). Remember to have the citations properly stated as to avoid any confusion.
At the end have someone read it.
Good Luck !!!
may be you understood me, its like cross reference
since you are going to use the reviewer's interpretation, you will have to cite the review. you could cite both (john doe's interpretation (1) of jane dough's work (2)).
sometimes when writing a paper there is a restriction on the total word count and number of references imposed by the journal. In a review article there may be many refrences just for one paragraph, and if you are going to summerize a paragraph in that review, you can not use all the citations mentioned for that paragraph. In this case you just refer to the review article as the citation.
hopefully I am not mistaken!