Plagiarism is not a single behaviour. A useful taxonomy separates copied wording from borrowed structure, copied ideas, hidden collaboration, false authorship, unattributed reuse and misleading claims of originality. Some forms are obvious, such as verbatim copying from an online source. Others are harder to classify: patchwriting, where copied phrases are stitched into a new passage; paraphrase plagiarism, where the language changes but the source dependence remains; and self-plagiarism, where previous work is reused in a way that misrepresents novelty.
The taxonomy also includes less familiar forms such as cryptomnesia, sometimes described as inadvertent plagiarism, where a person later presents an idea as their own without remembering earlier exposure to it. Research on cryptomnesia links this to source-monitoring failures rather than straightforward deliberate copying.
A strong taxonomy gives readers the vocabulary to understand why different cases need different evidence. Copying a paragraph, buying a custom essay, reusing a figure, translating an article, submitting AI-generated work and duplicating one’s own published material all raise authorship questions, but not in the same way. The value of this section lies in precision: naming the behaviour accurately before moving to detection, prevention, policy or penalties.
Of all the categories in the plagiarism taxonomy, paraphrase plagiarism is the one that most reliably catches honest people out. Clone plagiarism – verbatim reuse – is unambiguous; almost no one who copies and pastes a paragraph from a journal article believes they are doing something defensible. Mosaic plagiarism is harder to defend but easier … Read more
In 2002, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin – a Pulitzer Prize winner, a regular on PBS, and at the time a judge for the prize itself – was found to have reproduced dozens of passages from other historians’ work in her bestselling book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. The passages were not copied wholesale. They were … Read more
Of the ten categories in Turnitin’s widely cited Plagiarism Spectrum, the first is also the bluntest: the clone, defined as “submitting another’s work, word-for-word, as one’s own” (Turnitin, 2015). It is the form of textual misappropriation that most readers picture when they hear the word plagiarism – a passage lifted intact, perhaps with the author’s name swapped at … Read more
Most people picture plagiarism as a side-by-side comparison: two paragraphs, the same sentences, perhaps a clumsily swapped synonym here and there. It is a tidy mental model, and it is the one that copy-detection software was built to enforce. It is also, unfortunately, wrong – or at least so incomplete that it misleads almost everyone … Read more
In order to fully understand the intricacies of plagiarism, one first must know the definitions of plagiarism. Then it is crucial to understand it and avoid it. Plagiarism is: the practice of taking somebody else’s work or ideas, and then passing it off as your own. This then, provides a working definition of plagiarism. While … Read more
If you are a student, then it’s essential that you don’t plagiarise when completing your assignments. So, you’re about to get a Plagiarism for Dummies 101 crash course. If you don’t want to get caught for cheating, you must remember and implement the following EIGHT points. 1. Don’t steal anyone else’s work and lie about … Read more
When studying at A-level, undergraduate level, or postgraduate level, it is important to understand the various types of plagiarism and what they entail, so that you can ensure that no course rules or regulations are broken – which could lead to you failing your assignment, or even being expelled from your course, college, or university!