What is accidental plagiarism?

There is another question posed by research students: what is accidental plagiarism. Plagiarism need not be intentional at all times. Blunders do happen and writers may commit the mistake of copying some idea, content, or data inadvertently. Such mistakes are quite common when students are not aware of the rules that are to be applied when using other writers’ work as literary resources. Even if they know the rules, they may fail to notice some minor sentence or data that is copied or they may fail to understand the text and express it in their own words.

The problem is that even when plagiarism is not deliberate, it is considered to be a crime and may lead you towards failure. Your university may still penalize you if you commit plagiarism without even being aware of it. Such mistake may happen because of the following reasons:

• Inaccurate paraphrasing: : Many times, you may think that you have written the matter in your own words, but actually, the content may be quite similar to what is written in the source. Hence, while you may consider a document original, it may have a lot of copied material. It is always better to write original rather than paraphrasing an idea.
• Improper quotation: Sometimes, you do not intend not to give credit to the original author whose content you may have picked up. However, you skip the simple quotation marks and it all goes wrong. Always ensure to keep quotes within quotation marks if you want to avoid plagiarism.
• Improper citations
• No citation: If you think plagiarism due to no citation can only result when you deliberately do it, then you need to rethink. On several occasions, you may simply forget the source from where you found certain information. Thus, you may end up neglecting or ignoring it. However, you may mix it with your own ideas and present it in your paper without any citation at the time you start writing. While it is just some bad memory, you may have to pay huge for it.
• Uncertain notes: When you make notes in a hurry, you may mix up your original work and the text that is from another source. If there is no approach to segregate them, then you may easily make the mistake of writing the copied content as your own. It is very important that you plan your note taking process. You may make use of different colored highlighters to mark separate notes or may use different colored pages to write them down. Additionally, it is also important to take a complete note of all the required information that has to be cited against the source information.

To ensure that you do not fall prey to such errors, let our professionals check your documents before you submit them. Write to us at info@plagiarismremoval.in if you want to detect and correct plagiarism in your thesis, dissertation, or research paper. Even when you require guidance on the use of right citation style, you may contact our experts. We hope you now have the answer to your question: what is accidental plagiarism. Thus, do not delay getting the right help on time.