Plagiarism: The Illegal Recycling of Information

Plagiarism: The Illegal Recycling of Information

Plagiarism is defined as using others people’s ideas, writings, and quotes without giving credit to the author by citing the material in the paper. Plagiarism can come from copying many things including charts, graphs, text, and music. Even paraphrasing an author’s work without citing it can be considered plagiarism. Plagiarism certainly has been around long before the first research project was assigned. One of the most famous scientists Gregor Mendel had his work plagiarized by another scientist Hugo de Vries in the 19th century.[1] Mendel had come up with breakthroughs in genetics, but no one realized what he had accomplished. Later in the early 1900’s, de Vries published a paper with very similar to Medel’s work. It was not realized until a third scientist Carl Correns was doing some similar experiments and read the works of both Mendel and de Vries. In his paper, he gave credit to Mendel and discredited de Vries’ work.[2]

The problem of plagiarism has increased drastically over the years with all of the new electronic sources. Now, all that the student has to do is to copy an article, highlight it and paste it into a word processing program. It was not much harder for a student to plagiarize before the Internet. A lazy student could easily copy an entire section out of a book word for word and conveniently “forget” to cite the reference from which it came. It would take the professor forever to find this source especially if it was not well known. With just some quick manipulating of words, professors can be tricked into believing that they are looking at a new original work.

There are several reasons why students...

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... forced to stop selling term papers over the Internet. As long as professors stand strong in their fight against this illegal recycling of information, plagiarism will be cut down.

[1]More, Randy. Rediscovery of Mendel’s Work. Bioscene, 27. 16-20.

[2]More, Randy. Rediscovery of Mendel’s Work. Bioscene, 27. 16-20.

[3]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[4]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[5]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[6]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[7]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[8]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[9]http://rbs2.com/plag.html

[10]http://rbs2.com/plag.html

[11]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[12]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[13]http://www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

[14]www.wordcheck.com, www.plagiarism.org

[15]www.plagiarism.