A plagiarized term paper is a paper that uses someone else's work without citing it properly. Plagiarized term papers can cause students to receive a failing grade for the project or for the course, so students should be careful to cite correctly all ideas that they obtain from research sources.
One may adhere to the following principles in order to avoid submitting an unintentionally plagiarized term paper. First, one should differentiate between general knowledge and ideas that a specific source provided. General knowledge is a piece of information that occurs in several independent sources, such as the distance between the sun and the earth or the date of birth of a political figure. One does not need to provide a citation for general knowledge. By contrast, one must cite a source's original ideas. For example, if only one literary critic has interpreted a text in a certain way, the student who borrows material from that interpretation would have to cite it.
Second, one should differentiate between common terminology and original phrases. The student may have had to learn some new vocabulary during the course of the project, but he or she can use that vocabulary freely without citing any sources as long as it is common jargon in the field. However, if the writer of a research source uses a unique phrase that the student has not encountered anywhere else independently, the student should place quotation marks around that phrase, even if it is only two words long. Students who are in doubt about whether or not to include quotation marks should generally err on the side of caution.
At times, students may wish to use other term papers as reference material in writing their own papers. If students are concerned about the validity of the reference term papers but do not have access to anti-plagiarism software, they may perform some simple investigation by searching for the unique phrases of the term paper in an Internet search engine. This type of search will not be perfect nor exhaustive, but it may possibly help identify plagiarized term papers.
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