There are many different ways to plagiarize someone else's work and all of them can result in disciplinary action by professors and the university, depending on the severity.
The most common forms of plagiarism are:
- "Direct Plagiarism is the word-for-word transcription of a section of someone else’s work, without attribution and without quotation marks." This is also referred to as clone plagiarism by Turnitin.
- "Self Plagiarism occurs when a student submits their previous work, or mixes parts of previous works, without permission from all professors involved. For example, it would be unacceptable to incorporate part of a term paper you wrote in high school into a paper assigned in a college course. Self-plagiarism also applies to submitting the same piece of work for assignments in different classes without previous permission from both professors." This is also referred to as recycle plagiarism by Turnitin.
- "Mosaic Plagiarism occurs when a student borrows phrases from a source without using quotation marks, or finds synonyms for the author’s language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original." This type of plagiarism is frequently called patchwriting and it most frequently occurs when students fail to paraphrase correctly. This is a combination of CTRL-C and Find-Replace plagiarism by Turnitin.
- "Accidental Plagiarism occurs when a person neglects to cite their sources, or misquotes their sources, or unintentionally paraphrases a source by using similar words, groups of words, and/or sentence structure without attribution." This a combination of Hybrid, Mashup, Aggregator, and Re-Tweet plagiarism by Turnitin.
The quoted definitions above are from the Dean of Students at Bowdoin College Brunswich. "The Common Types of Plagiarism." Office of the Dean of Students. https://www.bowdoin.edu/dean-of-students/conduct-review-board/academic-honesty-and-plagiarism/common-types-of-plagiarism.html. Accessed July 10, 2018.