The Effects of Plagiarism on Nursing Students

Plagiarism: An Academic Offense

Plagiarism is one of the major forms of academic offences. Overall, to plagiarize denotes stealing another person’s idea or work and using it as your own. Plagiarism is an act of taking writing, idea, or someone else’s work and presenting it as your own (Angélil-Carter, 2014). In light of this definition, this academic vice entails using a piece of writing or idea belonging to another person for personal benefit, without acknowledging or giving credit to the original source of the piece of work or idea. While plagiarism can either be intentional or unintentional, the intention of the person engaging in plagiarism is often to represent someone else’s work as their own.

Forms of Plagiarism

The act of plagiarism can include stealing any form of information from scripts, articles, internet, television shows, speeches, interviews, or blogs, among other sources. Plagiarism takes many forms, ranging from copy and pasting a material from the internet to make an alignment, to copying coursework material to attain better results (Angélil-Carter, 2014). The ease of availability of information has made plagiarism become a big problem in the writing world, and among nursing students (Krueger, 2014). The reason is that plagiarized work may lead to higher grades among nursing students, and can be used for entrance into job or higher education. What is more, plagiarism can mislead entry officers into believing that they possess skills and knowledge when they actually do not.

Avoiding Plagiarism

In the writing world in the health care sector, plagiarism is considered an act of fraud, hence the need to avoid it. To avoid plagiarism, it is important to acknowledge the source of information by using an in-text citation whenever you paraphrase information from another source (Krueger, 2014). Failing to accurately acknowledge, mention, or quote and cite someone else’s ideas or words with an in-text citation amounts to plagiarism.

References

Angélil-Carter, S. (2014). Stolen language?: Plagiarism in writing. Routledge.

Krueger, L. (2014). Academic dishonesty among nursing students. Journal of Nursing Education, 53(2), 77-87.