Section 1, Topic 2
‘Plagiarism’ is derive from the Latin word ‘plagiarius’ which means ‘kidnapper’ or abductor’, this it is an act of theft upon someone’s creativity, idea or language, without giving proper credits to the original author (Williams, 2002).
As we can see from above how easy it is to plagiarize, if I did not put the Harvard in-text referencing, I would be considered as plagiarizing. Furthermore, I got conference proceedings by searching Google, with this keywords ‘plagiarism problems’, and poof it is the third link, in Adobe ‘pdf’ format, ready for my eyes to read from it and use the information contain within it.
Nowadays a technology advances forward rapidly, it has become easier for people just to search the information they want, just like the BBC news article title says “Plagiarism: The Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V boom”, and copy and paste it in to their work without giving credit for the original.
However it not all bad news, because as plagiarizing is getting easier, so is detecting it. For most of us university students we have heard of Turnitin, it is deem as our worst enemy because of its function. This software, started in 1996, by a group of UC Berkeley researches who needed to monitor the recycling of research papers in their undergraduate classes and it is now serving 130 countries (turnitin.com). Basically it scans students’ work with their extensive database and the software will detect whether plagiarism exist in the students work. It has been said that at least 8 words in a sentence, matching the original source, is require before the system flags it.
According to Anderson and Steneck (2011), one of the harmfulness of plagiarism is, it breaks the ties between a researcher’s idea and the credit justly deserved for it, and at the same time it also distorts the record of who is responsible for the idea. Furthermore, it increases the strain on the system of research publication because it is easy to introduce false information into the scientific system, and distort what is fundamentally based on truth (Anderson & Steneck, 2011).
[Word Count: 344]
Reference List:
Anderson, M.S., & Steneck, N.H., (2011) “The problem of plagiarism” Urologic oncology, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 90-94
Turnitin.com “About us: Our Company” viewed on 10th June 2011,
Williams, J.B., (2002) “The Plagiarism Problem: Are Students Entirely to Blame?” ASCILITE, conference proceedings, viewed on 10th June 2011,
No comments:
Post a Comment