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Avoiding Plagiarism: Types of Plagiarism

This guide defines plagiarism and includes resources for responsible citation practices.

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Direct Plagiarism

This is what typically comes to mind when we think of plagiarism. It involves taking a piece or section of work created by someone else, without putting it in quotation marks or citing the source, and passing it off as your own.

Global Plagiarism

This type of plagiarism involves taking another person’s work wholesale and claiming it as your own. This includes having someone else, such as a friend, family member, or classmate write work for you as well as purchasing an essay from an essay mill.

Unintentional Plagiarism

Even students with no ill intent can find themselves plagiarizing work accidentally. Unintentional plagiarism happens when students fail to cite or misquote sources, and when they unintentionally repeat ideas, phrases, wording, and sentence structures from others without the appropriate attribution. It’s important to know that unintentional plagiarism is considered just as serious an offense as any other type of plagiarism and can incur the same consequences.

Self Plagiarism

Reusing your own work without acknowledging that it’s been previously submitted elsewhere is also considered plagiarism. While some may question whether this should count as unethical since you are simply repurposing your own original ideas, the fact is that when you submit scholarly work as part of your academic career, it is expected to be original. Reusing old work is a violation of academic integrity.

Mosaic Plagiarism

Taking ideas and/or pieces of text from different sources and fitting them together to create a “mosaic” of borrowed ideas is another common form of plagiarism, also known as patchwriting or patchwork plagiarism.