How To Write a Research Paper Without Plagiarizing
Plagiarism tops among the reasons why students dread research papers. Besides multiple corrections, plagiarism may cause you to retake your paper a couple of times, consuming your precious time. In other cases, you might face legal consequences for plagiarizing another scholar’s work.
Unfortunately, plagiarism may present its ugly head into your work without your intention. How can one manage plagiarism in research? Which technique is useful for avoiding plagiarism? This article will cover the forms of plagiarism, highlight various approaches to managing plagiarism, and prepare a unique paper.
What is plagiarism?
After the murder, plagiarism ranks as the worst crime you could commit in the scholarly field. Plagiarism is a situation where you present the ideas of another scholar as your own. This includes the deliberate cases where you ‘borrow’ a paper without acknowledging the owner or the cases where you accidentally omit the reference to a work that’s cited within your paper.
How much plagiarism is accepted in a research paper?
If possible, there should be no plagiarism in your work. As such, you should address a unique problem and acknowledge the sources used in structuring your paper. However, the reference section does not add to the total plagiarism of your work.
How to not plagiarize a research paper: strategies for preventing plagiarism
When working on your paper, we recommend the following tips for curbing plagiarism.
1. Paraphrase your work
When using other authors’ work to support your argument, avoid the verbatim presentation of these ideas. Instead, read the work and understand the message they are communicating in the article. Next, express these ideas in your own words, avoiding high degrees of plagiarism.
Next, include the proper reference of the site where you found these ideas. Avoid using article spinners as they could distort your message, compromising your argument. Also, avoid changing the key terminologies that are relevant to your topic as this could dilute your arguments.
2. Use quotations
If you intend to borrow words exactly the way they appear in a document, present them in your work in the form of quotations. Quotes give credit to the source you used when structuring the content, thus reducing the consequence of plagiarism.
When using quotations:
- Use double quote words to separate the quoted content from the rest of your article.
- Start your quotation with a capital letter
3. Cite the sources used properly
A key piece of advice on how to avoid accidental plagiarism is to countercheck your work and the recommended referencing style. When citing your sources, be keen to indicate the author, the book title, and the year of publication as prescribed by your selected style.
Be keen to follow the style that has been recommended by your tutor, avoiding various negative consequences. Finally, follow each intext citation with its reference in the bibliography section. Countercheck your work to ensure that all the sources in the reference list are well indicated in the body.
4. Keep meticulous records of your resources
Retracing a source used in writing your paper is a key struggle many students encounter. After taking tons of time to research your topic, you may struggle to gather all sources for the sake of reference.
5. Write from scratch
Another reason why students submit plagiarized work is because of mixing up chunks of paragraphs from articles and using these to make their argument. We recommend that you write from scratch, as opposed to patching up sections from other papers and journals.
6. Use a plagiarism checker
If you have worked hard on your paper and credited the sources used in creating your article, we recommend using a plagiarism checker to nub inadvertent plagiarism. Plagiarism checkers are software that compares your work with tons of publications on online databases, highlighting cases where you’ve not properly credited your sources.
This software thus helps you nub such issues and rectify various faults before you submit your work.
What are some examples of accidental plagiarism?
- Using the arguments as they are presented in another scholar’s paper.
- Accidentally using an argument as it is on another source
- Shuffling a sentence or changing a few words from the idea you picked from a source.
- Misattributing a citation to an idea borrowed from a source.
- Using a quotation without proper citation
- Use an image, table, or picture as your result without crediting the source.
- Citing a source too much in your paper. This may cause your paper to seem like a restatement of another writer’s paper. It is thus best to write your paper based on several sources that cover the ideas within your work.
Final take
What makes a good research study? Besides proper research, crediting your sources plays a key role in making a quality paper. These tips should come in handy to help you structure a quality, original paper. Feel free to consult our experts for custom paper help and support when dealing with urgent tasks.
