In today’s society, plagiarism of intellectual property is a common and very important issue to be considered since people’s ideas, thoughts, or scholarly researches are widely shared around the world. It might be pretty easy for us to be considered “stealing” others’ works on the Internet if we do not pay much attention to the issue of plagiarism. Plagiarism is extremely important for students and faculties in higher education since there are a lot of researches and brilliant academic works are being completed and published every day.

Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has given a general definition of plagiarism on ORI newsletter published in December, 1994. Plagiarism is considered to include both the theft or misappropriation of intellectual property and the substantial unattributed textual copying of another’s work. The theft or misappropriation of intellectual property here includes the unauthorized use of ideas or unique methods obtained by a privileged communication, such as a grant or manuscript review. On the other hand, the substantial unattributed textual copying of another’s work refers to the unattributed verbatim or nearly verbatim copying of sentences and paragraphs which materially mislead the ordinary reader regarding the contributions of the author. However, the limited use of identical/ nearly identical phrases would not be considered plagiarism if it will not mislead the ordinary reader. Additionally, Office of Research Integrity also provided a very useful guide to ethical writing, to help writers avoid plagiarism. Also, there are many helpful virtual tours on YouTube that can give people more ideas about plagiarism. For example:

 According to the Office of Research Integrity, there are three basic forms of plagiarism:

  1. Lifting the words right from the text verbatim without providing the appropriate sources
  2. Paraphrasing the words within a published document without gibing appropriate sources.
  3. Summarizing the ideas without providing credit to the author of the original text

In addition, based on the Writing Guides provided by Colorado State University, the most common forms of plagiarism share some key characteristics: lying, cheating, and stealing.

  1. Improperly documenting quoted, paraphrased or summarized source material.
  2. Borrowing another student's paper from a previous semester and calling it your own.
  3. Receiving help from other students on an essay or paper and turning it in under your own name as individual work.
  4. Deliberately failing to cite sources.

 However, plagiarism is still a very complex issue and a significant challenge for teachers or educators to tell their students how to avoid plagiarism. In most cases, they could just provide some guidelines for students to follow, or maybe just simply inform them “Don’t do it!” This kind of inhabitation could be abstract and hard to follow. Therefore, in order to identify and define plagiarism more correctly, it is important to let educators/teachers understand and realize that there might be many different perceptions, definitions and opinions related to the issue of plagiarism. In addition, before deliberating the plagiarism might exist, educators and teachers should consider the situation, environment, or the “world” where the students live in.