Plagiarism

Plagiarism by Rommy Rodriguez According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995) plagiarize means “take and use the thoughts, writings, inventions, etc. of another person as one owns”. It can be saidthat plagiarism represents to steal an intellectual property. Plagiarism mostly occurs, in academic and industrial environment, because there is not an adequate reference to the work or idea in whicha report, presentation or any documentation is based on; plagiarism can be seen also in arts. Some examples of plagiarism are: • give the ideas of others as yours in order to obtain the credit, foracademic or work promotion purposes, • copying words or paragraph from a website or a written text to use in your documents, • use of pictures, tables, diagrams from any source: book, website, guides,white papers, etc; without referring to the source, • express as yours an opinion of an author, journalist, politician, lecturer, • write a book with another author’s idea, • taking a music heard orcomposed from someone else and use it with your lyric, presenting the song as your creation. The facts that could promote plagiarism in our days are: • the lack of time to present a report or homework,• a strong competition and lack of ethics in the work area, • the writer of a document does not know how to make proper citations, • and, specially related to songs or literary art, a good prize, rewardor the fame itself. Despite that sometimes plagiarism seems to be something innocent, at the end it implies nothing but negative consequences, even legal issues, for example: • lost of credibility inyour work or carrier, • suspension or expulsion from the university, • immediate termination of your work’s contract, • civil litigations. Plagiarism is something that can be reduced with education.Education about how to make references to other’s ideas, education about ethical principles at work, education about the legal implications of plagiarism. (Department of Industrial Engineering,...