The research paper can become a death warrant for your career if the teacher finds plagiarism in it. You can face serious consequences like getting an ‘F’ in an assignment or subject and even expulsion from the institute for plagiarizing.
Writing a research paper is not an easy task. To write a research paper, you have to do a lot of work. Researching a topic, writing it down in your words with limited vocabulary, following the formatting standards and rules, and then making sure that it’s plagiarism-free, can be quite a bit to do.
Why Plagiarism is Such a Serious Issue for Students and Educators?
Plagiarism is a clear offense and crime because it’s like stealing someone’s work without giving proper credit to the author or creator of that work. A plagiarized research paper or thesis can put a student’s and institute’s creditability at stake. That’s why educators take this seriously.
Just a few years ago, during the election campaign in the United States, a politician was found plagiarizing a tweet and we all know how badly that hit the reputation of that politician. Now imagine if that 150-character tweet can do so much damage to a person, how badly it can hit the reputation of a reputed University or college?
How to Avoid Plagiarism?
Stealing someone else’s words can be disastrous for your educational career. If you had no other option, then a sentence rephraser can help to at least change the words and even the whole sentence structure to make it plagiarism-free. Below we’ll share such tips that you can follow to avoid plagiarism while writing your research paper.
1. Follow Proper Citation Rules and Style
If you are using someone else’s work, then you can either paraphrase it to make it unique or you can add the proper citation to let the user know from where you got the idea. Citation often saves you from getting blamed for cheating and stealing because you can give proper credit to the author or original creator.
Every university or college follows a certain set of rules and styles for citations and references. So here, in that case, citation alone will not be enough. You will have to do it properly by following the rules and norms of that particular institute.
2. Quotation Marks Can Be Career Savior
Just like citations, adding quotation marks can also be a career savior if you add exact words from a source. Most plagiarism checkers omit the phrases and sentences coming between quotation marks while checking plagiarism. So when your teacher or supervisor will check your research paper for plagiarism using an online plagiarism checker, it will simply ignore quotation marks and out will show no plagiarism.
3. Don’t Start at the Eleventh Hour
When you are a student, you always think like the hare from the hare and tortoise story and think that you have enough time to get your work done. And then the time comes when you think you can’t do it without using cheats and tricks. That story was told since our childhood just to teach us that we don’t have enough time. You’ll have to start early and keep doing it even at a low pace so that you can win the race.
When you’re assigned the task to write a research paper, start early. It will give you proper time to research and you will not think about stealing ideas and copying others’ work. Write daily even if you write just one page.
Doing it at the eleventh hour will force you to rush and then you will be missing a lot of useful information. You will be focusing on doing it by hook or by crook. This practice will definitely put you in hot water because you won’t have proper time to check your words before submitting them.
4. Paraphrase and Do It Quickly
The paraphrasing technique is always useful if you don’t have time to research. It can save you from getting caught plagiarizing because no plagiarism checker can detect paraphrased text. But if the time is short, then paraphrasing can be a headache because paraphrasing is a time-taking task. You can’t do it in a short time.
The good news for all the students is that you can paraphrase quickly, in just a blink of an eye. If you use an AI-based sentence rephraser. The online rephrasing tool can be a great tool for students. These tools use Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to paraphrase the text like a real human.
When the time is short and paraphrasing seems impossible, get help from an online paraphrasing tool.
5. Add Additional Information
Though paraphrasing can save you from the typical plagiarism checker’s radar, it can’t save you if your teacher finds the source from where you copied the idea. When students use the paraphrasing technique, they often keep the flow and headings the same. If your teacher Googles the topic and finds a similar page where the words are changed and everything else is the same, then your paraphrasing efforts will definitely go in vain.
To avoid this, leave no footprints and break the flow of the content that you’re paraphrasing. Change headings and their order as well. Add extra information so that your work can have more information than the source. This additional information will save you from getting caught.
1. Check for Plagiarism Before and After Editing
Checking plagiarism is a vital step that you can’t afford to miss. Whenever you write any academic research paper, check it using an online plagiarism checker to see if detects any plagiarism in it. If it finds something, rephrase that part and then recheck it.
Keep rephrasing the plagiarized parts till your research paper become 100% plagiarism-free.
2. Proof Read yourself or Ask Your Friend to Do it for you
Once you have all the writing and checking work done, don’t submit it. Rather, proofread it carefully. It is often found that you can’t find mistakes in your work. That’s human psychology and you can’t beat it.
So, a better idea is to find a reliable friend and ask him or her to proofread your research paper. If he or she highlights something that needs further clarification, rephrase that part to make it more understandable to the readers.
Once the proofreading and final rephrasing are done, put this all again in the plagiarism checker and then your paper is ready to submit.
Conclusion
Plagiarism can have disastrous consequences. But, it can be avoided by following simple techniques like paraphrasing, citing, quoting, rephrasing plagiarized sentences, adding reference pages, and checking for plagiarism using a plagiarism checker. We hope these tips will help you in your educational life to come up with unique research papers.
