Recommendations to Avoid Plagiarism

By: Javier Negrete Jr

In the academic environment, valid pieces of research are only produced with honest and
legitimate work. With legitimate work that provides insight to explore topics taught in universities,
students and professors are credited for the contributions. Academic institutions hold strict policies to
make sure that the research contributions remain accredited to the respective scholar. The majority of
the policies are against plagiarism. Plagiarism is the voluntary/involuntary use of research, projects,
ideas, or products without the proper accreditation to its creator. Another way of explaining plagiarism
is to think of it as stealing credit from the proper creditor.
Something to consider is that plagiarism is not always intentional and is punishable regardless.
Academic institutions hold their students accountable for following proper procedures to conduct
research. For example, the UNC Charlotte penalizes students with consequences as lite as simply failing
the assignment to failing the course.
There are ways to avoid plagiarism and any consequences from an institution. For example, MLA
Format is a style of structuring essays and gives careful guidelines to credit any sources. For example the
MLA format requires for there to be in-text citations with the last name of the author and the year that
the work was published. It recommends paraphrasing, using the correct information, giving full
reference in a separate citation page with hanging indentation.
It is very helpful to use resources that can are offered and found at academic institutions. For
example, libraries often have MLA, APA, and Chicago style manuals to cite sources. Websites such as
Son of Citation Machine have tools to submit documents and the tool completely scans the document
and searches for points in the document that maybe possible locations of plagiarism. Peer review
sessions are also very helpful to find the locations in documents that are possible examples of
plagiarism.