A student of graduate study has passed the stage of childhood school during the undergraduate study period. Graduate study leads to a master’s degree which is a very prestigious one. This degree calls for both the academic and personality maturity of the student. Hence, graduate degree is where the student becomes a serious scholar of the faculty he or she is studying in. This brings the added responsibility of writing more elaborate and high level papers. Here, questions on plagiarism, cheating and research ethics arise.
Stealing is a crime. Although it is easy to identify when someone is stealing money or other tangible items, stealing words, illustrations, tables, figures, thoughts, or ideas can be harder to recognize. This type of stealing is called plagiarism, and it is happening more frequently these days. Plagiarism can be a very difficult concept to grasp. After all, so many ideas and thoughts have been published already that it seems as though there are no original ideas anymore. What we perceive to be original thoughts really may be opinions and ideas written down by others and subconsciously ingrained in us through things we have read or seen. This is the dilemma of writers. Plagiarism can be intentional, but usually, it is unintentional.
There are many types of plagiarism. The most common are
- submitting someone else's written work as your own,
- copying information verbatim from the Internet,
- using incorrect paraphrasing,
- not documenting references, and
- copying from yourself. (Edlund, 2004)
One author has identified several reasons why plagiarism occurs, including
- pressure to publish, lack of time, the
- desire to get work into print quickly,
- simultaneously submitting
- an article to
- multiple journals in
- hopes of increasing the
- odds of acceptance, and
- carelessness. (Cronin, 2003)
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