To plagiarize essentially means to commit literary theft: to steal and pass off the words or ideas of another person as your own; this ties into intellectual property, or the expression of original ideas, which is protected by United States copyright laws. The majority of forms of expression are protected under copyright laws if they have been recorded.
Plagiarism encompasses a wide variety of actions. For example, submitting the work of someone else as your own is a very basic example of the actions that qualify as plagiarism, but it is also unacceptable to copy ideas or words from another person without giving credit, or change the words but mimicking the sentence structure of another work without giving credit. Other offenses that qualify as plagiarism include failing to properly format quotations, providing inaccurate information regarding the source of a quotation or submitting a work that is composed primarily of ideas and words from an outside source, regardless of whether acknowledgement is given. In the majority of these instances, an accusation of plagiarism can be avoided by properly citing your sources.
Many types of plagiarism are found that involve both neglecting to cite sources and properly citing sources. The informational website plagiarism.org has named these types of plagiarism to make it easier for readers to remember them. For example, "the self stealer" type of plagiarism features a writer who violates policies of originality by copying and re-submitting her own work, while "the photocopy" type features a work comprising large sections of text directly copied from a single source. Types of plagiarism that feature cited sources include "the forgotten footnote," where the writer references an author's name but not the location of the material, and "the misinformer," in which the writer purposely provides the wrong information about cited sources.
Many technological resources have been developed and are available for the detection of plagiarism. These websites, such as turnitin.com and other online plagiarism checkers, allow users to submit the text of electronic documents. The system checks written texts, scholarly journals and websites and the Internet to find specific phrases that match the submitted document. You can also analyze a written work for plagiarism by looking for phrases that appear to be above the skill level of the writer. While this does not necessarily indicate plagiarism, you may want to look further into it.