Types of plagiarism

There are a number of categories of plagiarism with varying degrees of academic crime, evaluated by different educational institutes. When the students or writers transcript the academic papers of others, it would be charged as academic misconduct or academic crime. The students are penalized by their principle authorities of the institutes by threatening expulsion from the institute, reduction of total percentage of course marks or failure in the annual academic exams.

1. Copy and Paste Plagiarism When the writer picks a very important phrase or entire sentence from other sources like virtual libraries, dictionaries etc without giving any reference or quotation marks, it would be taken as copy and paste plagiarism.

2. Word Switch Plagiarism If the writer takes a sentence from any other source and changes some words to their synonyms, it would be still considered a kind of plagiarism. It is very important to put quotation marks around the sentence, taken from other online sources or give text-in-citation of author or article. When a writer plagiarizes some content, he is too inefficient to create ideas as exposed in the source articles and in such cases, there is no use of quotation marks or citation.

3. Metaphor Plagiarism Metaphors are used for the clarification of ideas, emotions and feelings via analogous similes rather than demonstration of the object or process so simply. Metaphors are taken as most significant style of creative writing. When the writer uses metaphors from other sources for his term papers, essays etc for the illustration of his ideas without giving credit to the author of the source article, it would be taken as metaphor plagiarism.

4. Idea Plagiarism If the writer steals a creative idea for the solution of any problem from other sources without attribution to the writer of that source, it is called idea plagiarism. As the students or writers who plagiarize any kind of content, they are incapable to distinguish the ideas or solutions of problems by using public domain information or common knowledge.

5. Reasoning Style/Organization Plagiarism When the writer or students follow the source articles sentence-by-sentences or paragraph-by-paragraph for writing term papers, it would be taken as plagiarism, even though there is no exact match of any kind of logical sequence of ideas or order with the source articles accordingly. It would be considered as transcript of the authors’ reasoning style.