Plagiarism: Its Detection and Obstacles in Countering IT

With the technology, making deep inroads into every form and stage of academics, reliance on the internet as a tool for learning is ever increasing. With this, is increasing the practice of “literary theft” or “plagiarism” which means the practice of passing someone else's work or idea as one's own without giving due credit to its writer. Plagiarism may take many forms such as direct plagiarism, self plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism and accidental plagiarism. It needs to be avoided through proper citation and giving credit to the author. There are some hurdles in countering plagiarism such as; paraphrasing is hard to detect, sometimes restating a previous work is unavoidable and similarity index of a text is significantly increased because of presence of standard phrases which are unavoidable in a dissertation/thesis. Present paper attempts to develop an insight into the plagiarism and hurdles in countering it. It is believed that knowledge of “what plagiarism is” and “how to avoid it” along with following the practices essential to harness the writing skills of students and may prove helpful in countering plagiarism.