HOW TO AVOID PLAGIARISM WHEN WRITING UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH PROJECTS

Plagiarism is presenting someone else ideas, methods, or writings without mentioning the source with the aim of being claimed as a self-creation. The unaccredited use of somebody else’s words or ideas and is one of the most serious offenses any student can commit, whether the act is or not unintentional. Writing undergraduate research projects pose challenges in gathering literature and providing evidence for making the research stronger. Drawing upon previously established ideas, values and adding pertinent information in the scientific research are necessary steps, but these need to be done with caution without falling into the trap of plagiarism. Fortunately, it’s not all scary. Avoiding plagiarism is actually easy to do now that you have a foundational understanding of what it is. Plagiarism can have severe consequences on students and others. To avoid plagiarism, students must follow certain rules in regard to proper citations. This article provides a few basic rules for avoiding plagiarism when writing final year research projects.

THINGS THAT COUNTS AS PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism takes many forms. Some of the most common are: 

1. Buying, stealing, downloading, or borrowing a paper (from an individual/or online) 
2. Copying large sections of text from a source without quotation marks and citation 
3. Using the words of your source too closely when paraphrasing with citation 
4. Attempting to form ideas of others appear as if it is yours 

HOW TO AVOID PLAGIARISM

1. Understand the context, be aware of the situations in which you may be tempted to plagiarize, educate yourself about academic integrity and honesty and use effective strategies to research and complete your project successfully

• Do not copy and paste the text verbatim from the reference paper. Instead, restate the concept in your own words.
• Understand the idea(s) of the reference source well so as to paraphrase correctly.

2. Identify what needs and does not need to be cited

• Any words or ideas that are not your own but taken from another research needs to be cited properly. As you are researching, take careful precise notes by reading your sources.
• If you are using content from your previous paper, cite your own material. Using material you have published before without citation is termed self-plagiarism.
• After performing your tests the scientific evidence you gathered should not be cited.
• Facts or common knowledge need not to be cited. If unsure, include a reference.

The best way to avoid plagiarism is to give credit to the sources for what they have said, written, emailed, drew, or implied. Whenever you use something that is not your original material, you must give credit; here is a brief list of some the most common types of things that need to be cited: 

• Words and ideas from a book, article, movie, web page, lecture, letter, advertisement, song, TV show, or other forms of media 
• Words and ideas from interviews you have conducted (face-to-face, by phone, email, or other methods 
• Diagrams, charts, illustrations, pictures or other materials you have reprinted or adapted 
• Any exact wording or unique phrases you have taken from anywhere other than your own mind

Obviously, not everything needs to be cited. Some information can be used without citing and not be guilty of plagiarism: this includes: 

• Your own experiences, observations, insights and thoughts 
• Your own results from experiments you have conducted 
• Your own original artwork, video, photography, music or other media
• Common knowledge (including folklore, common sense observations, urban legends, and extremely well-known historical events) 
• Well-known and well-accepted facts known by the average member of the general population

3. Quote

Use quotes to indicate that the text has been taken from another research paper. The quotes should be exactly the way they appear in the research paper you take them from. Quotation marks are useful when you use others text to support your argument. Writing other people’s ideas in your own language is very important and should receive proper attribution. Researchers should avoid using unnecessary and irrelevant information from other articles. While submitting tables and figures from a previously published article, authors should acquire proper permission. Researchers need to cite their previously published work to avoid self plagiarism. Also always try to shorten the text and write it in your own words. In the end, review the text for appropriate source citations. Non-native English speakers have several limitations in writing and tend to use sentences from similar previously published papers.

4. Manage your citations

Maintain records of the sources you refer to. Use citation software to manage the citations used for the paper. Use recent references for the background information/literature survey.

5. Use plagiarism checkers

Various plagiarism detection tools like “iThenticate”, “eTBLAST” and "SmallSEOTools" can be use to ascertain what portion of the research work is plagiarised. “Grammarly” also offers a plagiarism checker that scans text for borrowed content for free. These tools will help to know whether or not parts of your research writing are plagiarized and some even highlight the specific words or sentences of concern and identify where the text originated from.

CONCLUSION

The best way to avoid having plagiarism is by checking a research by using “Plagiarism Checker”. There is several free online plagiarism software to test how original a research is. This software for checking plagiarism helps a researcher immensely to check a paper for plagiarism. It helps reviewers, as well as researchers, check from having an unoriginal paper.