Plagiarism is defined as the unacknowledged use of the words, ideas or creations of another. The principal categories of unacknowledged use are unacknowledged quotation, which is failure to credit quotations of another person’s spoken or written words; and unattributed borrowing, which is failure to credit another person’s ideas, opinions, theories, graphs or diagrams. Unattributed borrowing also includes the failure to credit another person’s work when paraphrasing from that work. Cosmetic paraphrasing is also plagiarism. This occurs when, even with acknowledgement, the words are so close to the original that what is deemed to have been paraphrased is, in fact, a modified quote, but is not presented as such. A more technical form of plagiarism is wrongly attributed borrowing, where one does not acknowledge the work from which one obtained an idea, but quotes, instead, the original source without having read it. This may well convey a broader research effort than that actually expended and may perpetuate misinterpretation.
