The best definition of plagiarism that I found is from wikipedia.com. The definition is a compilation of two sources; Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary (1995) and the Oxford English Dictionary (1999) - “Plagiarism is the "wrongful appropriation" and "stealing and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions" and the representation of them as one's own original work” Due to the availability of the internet and the amount of information that is at our fingertips we have introduced a new member of into the society of academia - the “e-Idiot” (O’Connor 2014)
The most common forms of plagiarism are found in student essays, academic professionals and in journalism. Student essays seem to be the most common things that contain plagiarism and according to the article To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery By Trip Gabriel (2010) many universities and colleges including Duke and Bowdoin are requiring prospective students to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before they can enroll, to help reduce the 61% rate of plagiarism in universities. To make matters worse “professors brazenly present as their own the work of colleagues, authors, and even
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Today the library is in the palm of your hand. “Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.” Susan D. Blum, a University of Notre Dame anthropologist, claims that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social