Page 211 - English for Writing Research Papers

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The idea is that you think about various alternatives, and then choose the one that

you are most confident about. S2 and S3 contain very simple constructions. S4 is
more complex, as this use of the present perfect is almost unique to English.

This technique should help you not only in writing manuscripts, but also in your cor-
respondence with editors (emails and letters), and when writing proposals and reports.

11.10 Plagiarism: A personal view

It is easy to become obsessed by plagiarism, particularly given that you can be 'dis-
covered' by software.

But there is a danger that the anti-plagiarists become unnecessarily rigid.

In my view, plagiarism is unacceptable under three main circumstances:

• plagiarism of others: when you try to deceive editors and readers that some
findings are yours when in reality they are someone else's and you have made

no attribution to the original author
• quoting directly from another author (and referencing the quotation), but regarding

a context that the original author did not intend. This is known as 'quoting out of
context', i.e. where someone doesn't report fully what the 'author' meant but just
uses a particular part of what was said in order to make a completely different point.

• self-plagiarism: when you try to publish essentially the same paper in more
than one journal

However, what I personally feel is acceptable self-plagiarism is in cases where you:

1. repeat the methods that you reported in a previous paper, if the method is
exactly the same (but see 16.6 for sensible ways of avoiding this)

2. use text from your own previous works but for a totally different audience
We should use common sense to understand (i) whether we or someone else has
committed plagiarism, and (ii) whether such plagiarism will really have a negative
impact on someone else.

And finally … I am a native speaker and English language teacher. I am very well

equipped to paraphrase. This is not the case for non-native speakers who simply may
not have the tools to do so – lack of vocabulary, lack of awareness of possible other
grammatical structures. In addition, the education system of many countries is based
around children and students studying texts and regurgitating them almost word for
word during a written exam or oral test. 'Plagiarism' in this form is ingrained into soci-
eties and cultures, so it is hardly surprising that it finds its way into research papers.