Plagiarism is a serious academic offense that can jeopardize a student’s academic standing, career and personal credibility. The best way to prevent plagiarism is to know what it is and how to avoid it. To help the students and researchers, let’s discuss how students can get rid of plagiarized content in their academic writings and use them to aid their research for better results. Apart from this, this guide will also cover the plagiarism-causes and solutions. So, without any further ado, let’s delve into this discussion.

What is Plagiarism?

The act of plagiarizing a piece of information is the practice of using someone else’s words or ideas without crediting the original owner or author.

Often, people think of plagiarism as copying words directly. But that is not the only way of committing plagiarism. For example,

• Students and researchers can use other people’s ideas, theories, or results without referencing or crediting them, which would be plagiarism.
• Similarly, using exact words is also plagiarism. But not using quotation marks or providing the reference would also be plagiarism.

But what are some of the best tips to avoid committing plagiarism? Let’s see them.

How Students Can Get Rid of Plagiarized Content in Their Academic Writings?

For any Ph.D., master’s student, or even a starting researcher, plagiarism is the most dreaded word. Therefore, let’s discuss the top tips students and researchers can use to avoid plagiarism.

1. Always provide a reference:

As mentioned in the definition of plagiarism, students and researchers should always provide references while discussing someone else’s ideas because it is essential to inform the instructors about the source of ideas. Even if a student or researcher is paraphrasing the information or using his own words to describe a statement, he still needs to add a reference to that paper, book, or thesis.

2. Add quotation marks when using the exact words:

When a student or researcher uses another person’s exact words, he should always add quotation marks. Moreover, depending on the reference style a student or researcher uses in his research or other academic tasks, he will also have to add the page number to inform the instructors about the original page number of the included information.

3. Use paraphrasing:

Paraphrasing refers to changing the ideas or words of another person into one’s own words. However, one of the biggest mistakes most newbie researchers and students make while paraphrasing is changing a few words or using a few synonyms. Doing this will lead to plagiarism because the structure of the writing will remain the same.

Thus, to avoid this, students and researchers should not leave everything intact by entirely focusing on using a few synonyms or altering a few words. Instead, they should rewrite the entire sentence or paragraph to avoid what might have led the student to plagiarize.

4. Use your notes when paraphrasing from a book, article, or paper:

Students and researchers should use notes when paraphrasing from another article or book. So, for example, when a student or researcher reads a paper, he should take notes on a piece of paper or laptop. Then, he should close the (original) source of information and use the created notes to write the paraphrased information.

Doing this will decrease the chances of plagiarism because students and researchers are not reading from the original information. Instead, they are focusing on their own words. And now, they must extract the data from notes in an academic way.

5. Understand the information thoroughly before paraphrasing:

The next tip relates to the previous tip because it is essential to understand the information thoroughly before paraphrasing it. So, students and researchers should read the original data (at least) a couple of times to fully understand the theme and idea of the original information.

Doing this will even eliminate the need for created notes because once a student or researcher has understood the central theme of a study or paper, he can quickly paraphrase that information in his own words.

*** Pro Tip: After writing the paraphrased information successfully, students and researchers should tally the essential numbers with the original data to ensure the correctness of provided information ***

6. Use a plagiarism checker:

Even after applying different techniques to avoid plagiarism, students and researchers can still commit accidental plagiarism. Therefore, before finalizing the content, students and researchers should check for plagiarism with the help of automated tools.

Automated tools use the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to quickly scan and compare uploaded information against published sources. Such tools can quickly determine whether a piece of content is original or not by underlining and highlighting the duplicate content. Moreover, plagiarism checkers also provide the users with sources of copied information to quickly determine the quality of the plagiarism-checking engine.

Some Tips and Tricks to Paraphrase Content:

The above tips show the importance of paraphrasing to avoid plagiarism. So, let’s discuss the tips to paraphrase something successfully.

• Paraphrase individual paragraphs instead of rephrasing the entire content at once.
• Change the voice of sentences. For example, if the original content contains a lot of passive voices, students and researchers can change their voice to active voice in order to paraphrase it.
• Use a different starting point for each paragraph to rephrase a piece of content successfully.
• Do not entirely rely on the synonyms-replacement technique to paraphrase something because using synonyms is not equivalent to paraphrasing.
• Most people rely on paraphrasing tools to rephrase something. But rephrasing tools do not bring accurate results on the first try. Therefore, students and researchers should use rephrasing tools multiple times to get the ideal paraphrasing results.

Wrapping Up – the Conclusion:

Students often feel overburdened by the pressure to write hefty and excellent academic content. They try to write the best they can and are always concerned about plagiarism. However, another aspect students should not forget when writing their academic content is quality.  They must remember that academics can be highly competitive. It’s not just about making an A grade or getting top marks but also proving a student’s worthiness by demonstrating how well he can write up-to-date academic content.