Plagiarism, its consequences, and how to avoid it

Plagiarism is a form of cheating, by which one presents as her/his work, what others have done. It may be severely punished, and could cause serious problems later in life. Self-plagiarism is also possible. Plagiarism, its consequences and and how to avoid it are discussed further below. 1 Plagiarism: What is it? Plagiarism often involves dishonest use of work done by others (including work in the public domain). However, an author may also dishonestly use her/his own previous work, which may be termed selfplagiarism . Teamwork could lead to plagiarism involving original work done by the team. 1.1 Plagiarising the work of others The Oxford Dictionaries de ne plagiarism as: the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them o as one's own [1]. For the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), plagiarism is: Taking over the ideas, methods, or written words of another, without acknowledgement and with the intention that they be credited as the work of the deceiver [2]. For other de nitions, see for example [3], [4, p. 7] and [5]. All de nitions associate plagiarism with taking what belongs to someone else without the rightful owner's consent (that is, theft), as well as with misrepresentation , that is, to present something in a deceitful way (with respect to ownership). Plagiarism applies also to computer code, to visual information such as diagrams and gures, as well as to artistic expressions such as lmic or theatrical scripts, poetry, and musical compositions. It is stressed that works in the public domain (that is, not copyrighted), unpublished work (such as personal letters and emails), material produced by anonymous authors, as well as anonymous collaborative work (such as Wikipedia articles) are treated the same as other works, for the purpose of plagiarism. The guidelines to avoid plagiarising such works are the same as for other types of work (see sect. 3). 1.2 Plagiarism and original team work A team member may commit a form of plagiarism by not doing a fair share of the team work. For example, if a team of three students submit a report for credit, it is presumed that, unless otherwise approved by the instructor, each team member has done about one third of the work. If it turns out that one of them did very little work, this student would be essentially claiming credit for work done by the other two team members. Furthermore, the other two students would also be at fault, if they allow a student to get credit for the team's work, even though s/he did signi cantly less than her/his fair share of the work. If a team member has done less than her/his fair share the instructor should be informed. In principle, it is presumed that all work of the team is jointly performed by all team members. Any sub-division of the work (for example, one member does all programming, another member does all report writing, or one member writes/program only the rst half and the other writes/programs the second half) should be pre-approved by the instructor.