Types of plagiarism

Plagiarism is truly a very funny thing. Even though it is highly dishonest and unethical, students still indulge in it because of laziness, lack of time and under confidence. This is not expected of them at all. It is a highly punishable and serious offense that can lead to even expulsion, Because of its serious implications; students many times try to disguise it under words such as “inspiration” or “reference”. There are a number of types of plagiarising that are practised today and they are very varied in nature. To combat it, its various types have to better understood and recognized for us to combat and deal with it. There are basically two types of plagiarising under which are many further subtypes of it. These are given below.

The first type is the one where sources are cited. The many types of plagiarism under this type are many. The first one is the total copy. This type of copying is truly the worst and most shameless type of copying. In this type, the person involved simply copies the whole work of another person absolutely word to word. The person makes no changes whatsoever to the work and does not do any type of editing or reformatting for that matter. This is normally done when the person is extremely short of time. The second type is the partial copy. In this type, the person only copies some major portions of another person’s work and the rest small portion he writes himself or herself. This is also as bad as the total type of copying. The third type is the various sources copy type of copying. In this, the person simply copies different portions of the work from various sources but alter them slightly for them to be able to fit together. The fourth type of plagiarism is the lots of time copying. Here, the person copies a lot of material from a number of sources yet puts it into his or her words. The fifth type is the self copy type where the person simply copies from his or her previous assignments thinking that it is not a form of copying.

The second major type of copying is the one where sources are cited but in an incomplete or wrong way. The first type under this is the forgotten source of information type. In this the student gives the author’s name but accidently “forgets” to provide the location of the source of information. The second type of plagiarism under this category is wrong source type of copying. Here the person gives the wrong details about the source of information to cover up the fact that he/she has copied from somewhere.