The 5 Types of Plagiarism listed below are from The Plagiarism Spectrum: Instructor Insights into the 10 Types of Plagiarism by Turnitin.
There are a lot of different ways to plagiarize, but there are 5 Types of Plagiarism that are the most common according to college professors who have seen a lot of college essays. Being aware of all 5 types will make it easier for you to notice when you may have plagiarized in the past without knowing it and will help you make a plan to avoid plagiarizing in the future.
Clone
Clone plagiarism is named after the process of creating an exact copy of an organism, like when Scottish scientists cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996 to prove it was possible to make exact copies of an animal’s DNA. This type of plagiarism is the most obvious and most serious. It’s when you take the whole essay or other type of work from someone else and you submit it as your own to get credit for it.
CTRL+C
CTRL+C plagiarism is named after the computer keyboard shortcut that you can use to copy a line of text after you highlight it with your mouse, pressing the CTRL button and the C button at the same time. This type of plagiarism is when you copy full sentences or paragraphs from another source and put them directly into your essay without quoting and citing them. It makes it look like the text is yours, but really it was written by someone else. Even if you are not using a computer to write your essay, you would still be doing CTRL+C plagiarism if you copy whole sentences or paragraphs from a research source by writing them into your essay.
Find-Replace
Find-Replace plagiarism is named after the computer word-processing function that lets you search for a specific word in your document and automatically replace it with a different word that you choose. In this type of plagiarism, you take sentences or paragraphs from a source, put them into your essay, and then go through and change a lot of the words to make it look like you wrote it. This is a common type of plagiarism even if you are not using a computer to write your essay. If you are reading from one of your research sources at the same time that you’re writing your essay, it’s likely that you are doing Find-Replace plagiarism because you are taking the ideas and just changing the words as you go. Some people think that doing the work of explaining someone else’s ideas in your own words means that you don’t have to cite what you paraphrased, but that’s not true. Since it still keeps the ideas and often the structure of the original, you would have to cite the source of the original text in order to avoid plagiarizing it. The best way to avoid doing Find-Replace plagiarism is by taking notes while you read your sources and then writing your essay based on your notes instead of directly from the original source. We will give you some suggestions for how to take notes during your research later in this workshop.
Remix
Remix plagiarism is named after the music production process of sampling from multiple existing tracks to create a new beat or a whole song. When you do this in writing, you have to show the sources for all of the original words and ideas that you got from other sources. It’s common to bring together information from many different sources in your college essays, so that process on its own does not equal plagiarism. The thing that keeps it from being plagiarism is citing your sources. As long as you cite everything you sample and remix, and you don’t keep the original structure of the sources you are remixing, you won’t be plagiarizing them.
Recycle
Recycle plagiarism is named after the process of turning an old thing into a new thing. Just like a glass bottle can be recycled to create a glass bowl, sometimes students try to turn an old assignment into a new assignment to get credit for it twice. If you ever have an assignment in a class that is similar to an assignment you did for a previous class, then it might cross your mind to use the same assignment again. But if you do that without getting permission from your current professor and your past professor first, then you will be self-plagiarizing. Even if the first paper you wrote was not plagiarized, using it again will become plagiarism. In the event that you really need to use information you wrote for a past assignment in a current assignment, you can actually cite yourself so that your professor knows what part of the assignment is old and what part you created new for their class.