The purpose of a research paper is to synthesize previous research and scholarship with your ideas on a subject. Therefore, you should feel free to use other persons’ words, facts and thoughts in research paper but the material you should borrow must not be presented as if it were your own creation. When you write your research paper, remember that you must document everything that you borrow-not only direct quotations and paraphrases but also information and ideas.
Often plagiarism in academic writing is unintentional, as when as the elementary school pupil, assigned to do a report on a certain topic, copies down, word for word, everything on an encyclopaedia. Unfortunately, some research scholars continue to take approach in high school and even in college, not realising that it constitutes plagiarism. To guard against the possibility of unintentional plagiarism during research and writing, keep careful notes that always distinguish among the three types of materials: your ideas, summaries and paraphrases of others’ ideas and facts, and exact wording you copy from sources.
Plagiarism sometimes happens because researchers do not keep precise records of their readings, and by the time they return to their notes they had forgotten whether summaries and paraphrases contain quoted material that is poorly marked or unmarked. Presenting an author’s exact wording without marking it a quotation is plagiarism, even if you cite the source. For this reason, recording only quotations is the most reliable method of note-taking in substantial research projects, especially for beginning research scholars. It is the surest way, when you work with notes, to avoid unintentional plagiarism. Similar problems can occur in notes kept electronically. When you copy and paste passages, make sure that you add quotation marks around it.
Another kind unintentional plagiarism happens when authors write research papers in a second language. In an effort to avoid grammatical errors, they may copy the structure of an author’s sentences. When replicating grammatical patterns, they sometimes inadvertently plagiarize the author’s ideas, information, words and suggestions. if you release after handing the paper in you accidentally plagiarized an author’s work, you should report the problem to your instructor as soon as possible. In this way you eliminate the element of being fraud. You may receive a lower than you hoped for, butting a lower grade is better than failing a course or being expelled.