Case Study 2

Khushboo is watercolor painting artist. She regularly posts her work on her social media account. One day she noticed that some account has been posting the same artworks as she had shared. Her friends told her that it is called plagiarism. Khushboo then took some measures to complaint about the fake account and decided to be more careful about such things in future.

Answer the following questions.

(i) Define Plagiarism.

(ii) What are the intentions behind plagiarism?

(iii) What precautions can be taken to avoid plagiarism?

(iv) How can you give credit for someone else's work?

(i) Plagiarism is stealing someone else's intellectual work, such as an idea, literary work or academic work etc., and representing it as our own work without giving credit to creator or without citing the source of information.

(ii) The intentions behind plagiarism may be:

1. Lack of creativity or skills to generate original content.
2. Pressures such as tight deadlines or academic demands.
3. The desire for praise, recognition, or success.
4. Fear of failure, punishment, or negative consequences.

(iii) The precautions which can be taken to avoid plagiarism are:

1. One must specify the source, which informs the reader about the basis of one's ideas and the extent of one's research.
2. To avoid plagiarism, one should refer to several sources, understand the concept, and then pen down one's understanding of the topic.
3. One should use quotation marks around all the quoted words to avoid plagiarism.

(iv) To avoid plagiarism while referring to someone else's creation, we must give credit whenever we use:

1. Another person's idea, opinion, or theory
2. Quotations of another person's actual spoken or written words
3. Paraphrase of another person's spoken or written words