{"id":3776,"date":"2021-08-06T02:17:35","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T02:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/six-ways-to-avoid-plagiarism-in-research-papers\/"},"modified":"2026-02-22T11:15:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T05:45:13","slug":"six-ways-to-avoid-plagiarism-in-research-papers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.editage.com\/insights\/six-ways-to-avoid-plagiarism-in-research-papers","title":{"rendered":"Six Ways to Avoid Plagiarism in Research Papers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine how upset you would be if someone uses the technique you had developed after years of patient work and publishes a paper based on the technique mentioning neither your name nor the original paper you wrote that describes the technique. That somebody is a thief in that the author used your ideas without acknowledgement.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Plagiarism applies the same logic, not only to ideas but to the choice and arrangement of words or even to figures and tables, which are often part of many research papers. Under intense pressure to publish, some academics and researchers resort to plagiarism: they put together a paper \u2013 with or without any research to back it up \u2013 by searching for a few papers on a given topic and copying entire paragraphs from them and pasting them into a new document, which eventually becomes a paper they submit to a different journal, different from any of the journals that had published the papers on which the new paper is based. This is an extreme case, but plagiarism happens even more frequently on a smaller scale: in agricultural research, for example, a researcher conducts an experiment on rice virtually identical to the experiment somebody else had conducted on wheat. And instead of describing the methods in his or her own words, the rice researcher simply copies the relevant section from the paper on wheat and pastes it into the paper being written on rice. That too is plagiarism\u2014which is becoming increasingly easier to detect as research publishing becomes almost entirely digital.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Following this brief explanation of what plagiarism is \u2013 essentially, \u2018borrowing\u2019 pieces of text published elsewhere and incorporating them into your article without any indication that you have done so \u2013 this short article mentions different types of plagiarism and offers some tips on how to avoid it in your work.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Types of plagiarism<\/a><\/p>\n

6 Tips to avoid plagiarism<\/a><\/p>\n

Types of Plagiarism<\/h2>\n

Plagiarism is not restricted to words alone: inserting without attribution a diagram or even a photograph taken from elsewhere is plagiarism, as is using others\u2019 ideas or methods. What is unethical is not borrowing itself but borrowing without attribution<\/i> or without acknowledgement. After all, science is essentially built bit by bit, by researchers who add to or advance the work of their peers, both present and past.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Plagiarism can be categorized by<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n