Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism in Academic Writing

Plagiarism is a buzzword in the research world. Along with academic misconduct, it is also a punishable offence. This is the idealistic dilemma faced by anyone who has ever written or evaluated an article /manuscript, a research report or a doctoral thesis. The boundaries between plagiarism and research are often vague and abstract. Knowingly or unknowingly, students and researchers fall victim to this. This paper points to the need to develop awareness and to take appropriate precautionary measures to make academic writing original. The paper also discusses major plagiarism checking software available in the market. how for they allow for integration with Learning Management Systems, the file formats they support, their Unicode compliance and their key characteristics. Author opines that all similarities are not plagiarism. Works with similar vocabulary are common in research writing. Artificial Intelligence-based software tools are available, to detect them but according to author analogy and plagiarism can only be recognized based on human intelligence and subjectively acquired knowledge.