Rex Libris by Rex Molina

     Mabuhay readers! This is Rex, your friendly-neighborhood librarian, at your service.  In my first appearance in our newsletter, I’m going to answer a question that I hope everyone has asked before writing a paper.

     Dear RexLibris,
     What is plagiarism? What can I do to avoid being labeled a plagiarist?

     If you regularly read our newspapers, you might say that plagiarism is the hot trending topic for this year, with a business tycoon delivering a commencement speech that was later discovered to be a mashup of other celebrities’ earlier speeches and a high court justice using different sources without proper attribution as part of his decision’s arguments.

     Now, each of these circumstances has drawn flak to the person in question from people who value intellectual honesty. As plagiarism is also a source of great shame, it caused one of the two to tender his resignation due to delicadeza.

     Now, even if you have friends in the Supreme Court that can exonerate you, plagiarism can still cause grief and a blow to your credibility that you would be better off avoiding it altogether. Not to mention it is unethical. Plagiarism, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary athttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/plagiarism, comes from the Latin wordplagiarius, which means “kidnapper, seducer or plunderer”. When a stealer of ideas who doesn’t give proper acknowledgment is likened to those kinds of people, you can see that way back then they already regarded the act as serious.

     Anyway, this is one of the definitions that will come up if we type “define: plagiarism” in Google:  “[the] failure to give the source of a quotation or paraphrase in which the language, thoughts, or ideas of another person are used as one's own.” (from University System of Georgia’s Website:
http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/ollc_glossary.phtml)





     In the article “What is plagiarism?” (inside the Dec. 5, 2010 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine, pp. 13-14, but you can also view it online: http://tinyurl.com/WhatsPlagiarism), Dr. Teresita Gimenez-Maceda lists the several ways you can plagiarize which I summarized below:

• When you copy verbatim (word for word) and you do not enclose the lifted passage in quotation marks: even if you include your reference in your bibliography at the end of your paper, it would still constitute as plagiarism.
• When you reword or paraphrase another author’s idea and there is no attribution to the original author: the reader assumes that in every section of your work that you don’t acknowledge anyone, the idea there that you’re conveying is originally yours. But is it?
• When you translate in Filipino or in any other language somebody else’s ideas “and fails to enclose the translated material in quotation marks” (p.13): It still is somebody’s idea. Let’s be honest and give recognition to our sources, shall we?

     Please remember that plagiarism is gravely frowned upon in academia and even though you would think it is easy to plagiarize in this digital age, the truth is, it is getting harder and harder to get away with it as there are also easy and many ways to detect plagiarism. And it doesn’t matter if the act was done inadvertently or intentionally. Ultimately, we are responsible for whatever papers we submit, so we should always check our output for missing attributions. As Dr. Gimenez said, it is about honesty, and it “is all that is required of us to keep our integrity and dignity intact” (p.14).

     If you have any trouble in making proper citations, don’t hesitate to visit the library. We have, among others, the 5th edition of APA Publication Manual in our Reference section and the 2nd edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers in the Reserve.

     Email the author at [email protected]