Plagiarism

After reading Trip Gabriel's "Plagiarism Lines Blur for students in Digital Age," I come to agree with him. He writes that one of the reasons plagiarism has increased in these modern days, is because of the fact that information is so readily available. He claims that it creates the notion that no one owns any of the information, and that it does not need to be cited. This is particularly the case when the author has not been specified. He claims that it distorts the meaning of ownership, and therefore, students don't feel they are doing anything wrong by copying and pasting. (Gabriel 108).

I agree that the lack of publishing information is part of why plagiarism has increased. In a hard copy book, you have an entire page dedicated to the publishers and copyright information. There you can find the author, the publisher, the date it was published, where it was published, and pretty much everything you need to make a good citation. However, when you turn to an online source, it can be so difficult to find any type of information covering who wrote the information or ideas that you are using. It can even seem impossible. I myself at times have grown so frustrated trying to find information I could use to cite an article I was planning to use, that I decided in the end to find either another article that has the same information, or I would just simply take out the entire example, so that I wouldn't have to cite it.

As much as I agree that the lack of a publishers information can be a part of the problem, I have my own theories as to why plagiarism occurs. One possible reason is that some people simply don't know how to cite a source, or don't realise how important it is. However, this is no excuse for plagiarism. Especially not in a society so full of technology that someone could very easily find a website such as http://www.easybib.com/ which cites pretty much any source for you. If you're using an online source, usually you can copy and paste the html into the http://www.easybib.com/ page and it will find all of the publishers information that has been made available to you, and sometimes more than you would have found, making a much better citation than you could have done yourself.

Another possible reason some people plagiarise, is that they simply forgot to cite a source. It was completely unintentional, but in all the information they used, sometimes you forget to cite one or two of your sources. I have made this mistake in the past myself. One time I had to do an oral presentation, accompanied by a powerpoint presentation. I had to cite all of my sources on the powerpoint, and then write an essay saying pretty much everything I covered in the oral presentation. Then, I had to cite all of my sources a second time in the essay. However, I forgot to cite one of my sources in the essay, but since I cited it in the powerpoint, my professor was kind enough to overlook it, while making a note for me that I needed a citation there. The fact is though we are only human and sometimes when dealing with many many sources, we sometimes make a mistake and overlook one or think we already cited it when we didn't. We do forget things.

While the lack of publisher information or not realising the importance of citing may be the reason for increased plagiarism, it certainly isn't the only reason. There must be many more reasons that even I have not been able to mention, but plagiarism is still inexcusable.