One of the most vital rules that a writer or researcher should live by is to prevent plagiarism. The act of committing such is considered more than deplorable in the field of journalism and researching. This is such because plagiarism only shows one major dreadful thing about a writer/researcher- that he/she is comparable to a thief and that they lack respect to their chosen career or field.

Often conceived as the act of using the works of others and claiming them as one’s own, plagiarism is considered a plague in the field of writing and researching, but its curse extends to areas of graphic or image designing, music composing, and many more. Basically, plagiarism in the field of writing and researching is done through two things. The first of which is by not citing the sources. Apparently, many writers, especially students, think that once they paraphrase sentences, plagiarism is no more of a concern even if they do not cite their sources. What they do not know is that, even if its paraphrased, the fact that you “copied” the idea expressed in the source imply that you still have to acknowledge the author of the source.

Another common misconception that encourages plagiarism is the idea that once the source is already identified, there is no need to put quotation marks on the original texts that was copied from the source. This then is also wrong since the act of not putting quotation marks implies that the choice of words and the style of writing is the researcher’s own.

In order to prevent plagiarism, people should be aware that they need to acknowledge the sources of the ideas and works that they used–may it be in the form of texts, graphs, images, or whatever material. In the case of writing researches, the researcher/writer should make it a point to always cite their sources and write the information using their own words. Moreover, they should see to it that they incorporate their own new and original ideas about the subject matter.

At present, plagiarism becomes more and more prevalent due to the existence of the World Wide Web. This is so because many cybercitizens think that they can use any idea, information, or work posted on the web without giving due credit to those who owned or created such.

Unfortunately, the media and the various governments do not have many programs that address concerns on the prevention of plagiarism. The society, both of the real and the virtual world of the web, lack information dissemination campaigns on the ways of preventing plagiarism. However, to ensure competitive creativity development, the need to prevent plagiarism should definitely be addressed without delay as more and more technological innovations come and as communication and information exchange happens at a faster phase.

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