Skip to Main Content
It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results.

Plagiarism

This guide provides an overview of plagiarism.

Types of Plagiarism

There are many different ways to plagiarize someone else's work and all of them can result in disciplinary action by professors and the university, depending on the severity. 


The most common forms of plagiarism are:

  1. "Direct Plagiarism is the word-for-word transcription of a section of someone else’s work, without attribution and without quotation marks." This is also referred to as clone plagiarism by Turnitin.
  2. "Self Plagiarism occurs when a student submits their previous work, or mixes parts of previous works, without permission from all professors involved. For example, it would be unacceptable to incorporate part of a term paper you wrote in high school into a paper assigned in a college course. Self-plagiarism also applies to submitting the same piece of work for assignments in different classes without previous permission from both professors." This is also referred to as recycle plagiarism by Turnitin. 
  3. "Mosaic Plagiarism occurs when a student borrows phrases from a source without using quotation marks, or finds synonyms for the author’s language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original." This type of plagiarism is frequently called patchwriting and it most frequently occurs when students fail to paraphrase correctly. This is a combination of CTRL-C and Find-Replace plagiarism by Turnitin. 
  4. "Accidental Plagiarism occurs when a person neglects to cite their sources, or misquotes their sources, or unintentionally paraphrases a source by using similar words, groups of words, and/or sentence structure without attribution." This a combination of Hybrid, Mashup, Aggregator, and Re-Tweet plagiarism by Turnitin.  
The quoted definitions above are from the Dean of Students at Bowdoin College Brunswich. "The Common Types of Plagiarism." Office of the Dean of Students. https://www.bowdoin.edu/dean-of-students/conduct-review-board/academic-honesty-and-plagiarism/common-types-of-plagiarism.html. Accessed July 10, 2018.

More Types of Plagiarism

Turnitin is a service that can be used to detect plagiarism. This software identifies 
10 
different 
ways to plagiarize. 

Was this guide helpful?
Yes: 28 votes (80%)
No: 7 votes (20%)
Total Votes: 35

If you select "no," please send me an email so I can improve this guide.

Copyright © University of North Texas. Some rights reserved. Except where otherwise indicated, the content of this library guide is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Suggested citation for citing this guide when adapting it:

This work is a derivative of "Plagiarism", created by [author name if apparent] and © University of North Texas, used under CC BY-NC 4.0 International.

Additional Links

top
https://guides.library.unt.edu/plagiarism/types
guides.library.unt.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-49
56553
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UUI4EPJKWNWO6B6JFUIZW2QO76LYCRRC
<urn:uuid:015c3f9c-2485-4003-b887-f6acdf89cfca>
2022-12-10T03:11:52Z
54.88.35.99
text/html
sha1:SSISWRU2IDYXWK2UVOITEFUCHILJRSQV
<urn:uuid:4fde0c09-3cd6-4a6f-ae62-da78e43df016>
https://guides.library.unt.edu/plagiarism/types
response
<urn:uuid:be3d84d3-8c34-40cb-813a-95dc527e42ac>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-49
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-51
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/