Am I plagiarizing?

Abstract

Documents being caught with plagiarism issues are a common problem. Plagiarism mainly concerns students as they might not be quite familiar with what plagiarism entails . Plagiarism consists of five different categories, thus it is important to pay utmost attention whilst bringing up a document. Additionally the proper use of citation and referencing is also of paramount importance. Presenting plagiarized work as one's own is illegal and precaution in presentation is crucial. Avoiding such scenarios involve actually getting to know what each type of plagiarism consists of. Most students get caught with Style Plagiarism where there is no direct copying of text but the style of the text is the same as that from a particular source article that had been researched. Manually checking for plagiarism is very time consuming and laborious. Therefore having a system that automates such task is ideal. However existing software tackle such task but no other software prevents plagiarism in real-time while having the user input text. The main objective of a Plagiarism Avoidance System being presented for this final year project is to aid users in bringing up documents which are plagiarism free. The focus for such software is to be used by students. At the moment, current available software is capable of detecting plagiarism; hence students who have finished typing text into their document make use of such software before submitting it to the university. The current software available on the market runs through the document and checks for the different kinds of plagiarism. Any threat detected is identified and the user is informed with all possible threats but it is in his interest to arrange accordingly to avoid getting caught with plagiarism. This kind of plagiarism mechanism is known as plagiarism detection. On the contrary, Plagiarism avoidance is what is being presented for such final year project. The difference between avoidance and detection is that the former gives feedback to the user while he is writing the document, hence providing knowledge of what could possibly be plagiarism on the text input in real-time, and the latter provides feedback on the document once it has been submitted, that is, having a finalized document and feedback is not issued in real-time.