How to avoid plagiarism as a student
Many Universities in Nigeria takes plagiarism seriously as a result, some university in Nigeria now make use of Turnitin software to check if the projects submitted by its student are their original work. Hence, a lot of student are asking this question: “how to avoid plagiarism in research?”.
Although, collecting literature from past research when writing your thesis is a hard thing to do. However, the use of established ideas, values or adding relevant information on your thesis is necessary and every student should do this with caution to avoid penalties for plagiarizing a work.
How to avoid plagiarism as a student
What is Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is the act of copying people’s ideas, works or writing and pretending they are yours. It is also making use of already researched work or your own previous works without acknowledging the owner. Hence, it is a serious academic and intellectual offense that may results to negative outcome such as losing your author integrity and reputation or making your papers invalid .
How to avoid plagiarism in turnitin
1. Originality
Have an original content i.e. be the brain behind your write-up and avoid unnecessary copy and paste write-up to avoid plagiarism in writing.
2. Citation
It is essential as a student to know how to do a proper citation when writing your project.
Here are tips on how to do your citation, when writing your final year project as a student.
- you must properly cite every author/researcher ideas or work you used for your references.
- Also cite yourself: if the Ideas you are using is from your previous work you need to cite yourself to avoid self-plagiarism.
- Don’t cite scientific findings or test analysis.
- Don’t cite facts
3. Do proper citations
Ensure you note all the reference sources used and list them accordingly. You can use this web tool: Zotero.
4. Quotes
Make use of quotation marks if you can’t do without a certain sentence. This will indicate that the text was taken from another paper. Also, make sure the quotes are writing exactly the way they appear in the paper you are taking them from.
5. Employ the use of plagiarism checker
There are several free plagiarism checker site you can use to check your write-up and know the originality of your work. but, you should be careful about the site you upload your work into.
Note that you are allowed as a student to look at previous work or ideas from several author/researchers but it is important to understanding the content of the reference source and express it in your own language.
Also, if you are wondering how to not plagiarize facts the only way is to give credit to the writer by referencing them. Also, if you want to know how to summarize without plagiarizing then you have to do proper paraphrasing.
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