5 tips to help you avoid dissertation plagiarism
You have struggle d your entire life to reach a point where you are in a position to finally complete your academic career. You are ready to conduct research and scientific study which will lead to your presentation of a dissertation. It is a great moment. But, be careful. Plagiarism is always an issue. It is not enough to understand what plagiarism is, but also to know how you can avoid it when constricting your dissertation. Let’s look at a few tips that will ease your mind as you engage in this arduous process.
- Maintain a list of sources. This may seem like simple concept, but is often misunderstood and overlooked. As you do research, make a list of the books, periodicals, and journals that you review. If you make a copy of any articles, make sure the full citation is on the paper, or write it down on a list. If you do electronic research, make sure you make a note of all websites and reference material being utilized in your dissertation. Websites are notoriously unreliable and disappear, so always check again and again to verify the information.
- Understand the context of the information. When you read material, make sure you grasp the context of the arguments and the data, so that when you use the source in your dissertation you are correctly applying the information to your research. You do not want to quote a source as evidence of something when in its proper context it means something completely different.
- Have a plan. When you are doing research, and you come across a piece of information, or a quote you wish to use, have detailed and organized approach to how you will record the information for future use. Also, have a grasp of the time consuming nature of doing a dissertation, so that you leave yourself enough time to check sources, and get the proper references. Do not wait to get the citation, write it down contemporaneously when you find the information.
- Separate your work. As you are writing, keep your source material separate form your original work. In addition, as you take notes from other material, keep them separate from your drafts of the dissertations, that way they do not get combined and overlapped leading to plagiarism problems.
- Try to be exact. If you must paraphrase, make sure you acknowledge the source material explicitly in your text, and indicate you are paraphrasing. The best method is to quote exactly and then do a proper citation immediately in the text.
