10 Types of Plagiarism

1.Clone. This involves presenting someone’s work word for word without making any changes to the original text and omitting citation of the source.

2. Remix. It's when a writer paraphrases content from various sources to come up with a content that fits together perfectly.

3. 404 Error. This form of plagiarism uses citations to sources that either don’t exist or are inaccurate.

(The 404 Error is derived from the error message appearing when accessing an invalid or unavailable online resource.)

4. Retweet. This type of plagiarism occurs when the writer depends too much on the original text wording and sentence construction.

5. Hybrid. A writer embeds a well referenced source with content from other sources but does not cite all the text. Such text ends up crediting fewer sources than were actually used.

6.CTRL – C. The majority of the plagiarized text is exactly the same as the original text with minimal changes made. It is almost akin to cloning but here the writer only makes few changes to the original text.

7. Find – Replace. When only the key words and phrases of the original text are replaced with synonyms or closely related words.

8. Recycle. The writer uses his or her own previously produced content and fails to properly provide citation. It is also known as self-plagiarism.

9.Mashup. This is content obtained from an array of different sources and is presented without the appropriate citation.

10. Aggregator. Although the writer includes proper citation, the entire work is mostly composed of citations and lacks original content

Consequences of Plagiarism

Through completing the self-test you have learned that there are several different types of plagiarism, some obvious and some quite tricky. But did you know that you can commit plagiarism by:

using someone else’s idea (even if you express it in your own words) and not citing the original source?
forgetting quotation marks?
taking a short passage from another source and not re-writing it completely in your own words?

Do Students Really Plagiarize?

Unfortunately the answer is yes. Take a minute to browse through Plagiarism: Facts & Stats to view survey results about the number of students who plagiarize.

The Consequences of Committing Plagiarism

The penalties for academic dishonesty can be severe and range from a warning, to failure of a test, or assignment.

How Can Plagiarism Be Avoided?

The remainder of this tutorial is designed to give you skills and knowledge to help you avoid committing plagiarism. In the first section you'll learn about the importance of citing your sources properly. In the second section you'll learn about other skills such as note-taking and paraphrasing which will help protect you from stumbling accidentally into the plagiarism trap.