10-12 Writing and Publishing Scientific Articles
plagiarism, an author presents as his or her own ideas, language, data, graphics, or even scientific protocols created by someone else, whether published or unpublished, without giving appropriate credit.” (From: American Medical Association Manual of Style ; based on: National Academy of Sciences. Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992.) Most people think that plagiarism is the “verbatim [word-for-word] lifting of passages without enclosing the borrowed material in quotation marks and crediting the original author.” (From: American Medical Association Manual of Style ; based on: Some Notes on Plagiarism and How to Avoid It [handout]. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.) But plagiarism also occurs in a form known as “mosaic plagiarism.” This is when an author takes a few ideas from an original source, including some verbatim words and phrases, and then intersperses those ideas with his or her own ideas and opinions without distinguishing between the 2 and crediting the original source. There are 2 things wrong with mosaic plagiarism. The first, of course, is that the author has taken someone else’s original ideas or description and presented them as his or her own. The other problem is that in the process of adding his or her own ideas and interpretations, he or she may change the other author’s original message. The simple solution to avoid mosaic plagiarism is to Restate the wording or ideas of the original author in a way that is completely true to the original, and Attribute the content to the original author. This is getting into the practice of paraphrasing, which is perfectly acceptable. Very simply, paraphrasing is taking someone’s original description and restating it in your own words — but always with appropriate credit to the original source. A last thing to be careful of is not to plagiarize yourself. Yes — that, too, is plagiarism. It is not acceptable to take a paragraph, a table, an introduction — any previously published material of yours — and present it in another manuscript as entirely new material. There may be a strong temptation to do so. After all, this eliminates having to take the time to describe something in entirely different words. But self-plagiarism is not acceptable. For one thing, it violates copyright law (please see “Appendix 2: Copyright” for information on the basics of copyright). The only way you can re-use your previously published
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