RESEARCH AND PLAGIARISM IN ESSAYS

TIPS FOR RESEARCH AND PLAGIARISM IN ESSAYS

February 15, 2018

Writing assignments remain a crucial part of the academic curriculum from junior school to college and beyond. This is because professors believe that such tasks persuade a student to get involved in useful activities like brainstorming, researching and team work. Considering the fact that quality matters the most in such assignments, you should know that there are certain things that determine the quality including, but not limited to, writing style, author’s tone and researched content.

Essay writing service claims that from all possible determinants of content quality, research remains a significant one. The research strategy you adopt plays a crucial role because research consumes a lot of your time and effort and executing the strategy incorrectly can lead to plagiarized content. Plagiarism is a crime and you can face disciplinary actions if found guilty of plagiarism so you must at all times avoid it.

Research and plagiarism go side by side in the sense that students often do not cite the researched content properly that leads to unintentional plagiarism. However, the institute is least concerned about whether plagiarism was intended or not and action is taken nevertheless. This is important because when you step into the professional life, there are nearly no possibilities of escaping from this crime and hence professors want you to learn strategies on how to avoid plagiarism at the earliest.

Road to efficient research

Let us highlight both factors individually. There are several ways in which you can conduct research efficiently. An efficient research will make finest quality data available to you while writing on a specific topic. Following are some tips that can boost your research strategy:

• Stay away from distractions
  The first important tip to keep in mind is that distractions can waste a lot of time in research. There are numerous distractions in the life of a student including social media notifications, friends’ invitations for hang out plans and freelance work. When you begin your research, make sure that you turn the internet off or, if possible, put your phone on airplane mode so that no one disturbs. Only check your phone once you complete at least one part of research.As a result of distraction, your attention is diverted and it is usually a prolonged one leading to significant loss of time.
• Do not sit for several hours straight
  Assuming you conduct entire research online since that is a major source of information in today’s globalized era, it is recommended that you do not sit for five or six hours straight for research work. While workload may be high, it is imperative that you take a five to ten minutes break after every couple of hours of research. These short breaks allow mind to rest and hence work efficiently for the next several minutes, thereby boosting overall efficiency.It is advised that you consume coffee in some of these breaks to keep your mind active. Drowsiness can also make research significantly inefficient.
• Wise choice of search engine
  Finally since majority of research is internet-based, efficiency is determined by the search engine you choose. If you opt for search engines that filter out irrelevant results like Google Scholar, it cannot only save ample time but also reveal academic journals and papers that are highly credible.You will not have to worry about the authenticity of your research data and hence this becomes a convenient option too.

Avoiding plagiarism

Now that you know what efficient research is, it is imperative to cite sources from where data is taken. One cited, the copied content will not be counted as plagiarized given that you have followed the correct format and style. Following are a couple of tips to avoid plagiarism in your content:

• The easiest way to avoid plagiarism while extracting information from the internet is to paraphrase. Paraphrasing means that you take an idea of content from a source and present it in a different style using different words. This may not even require citing the source since it is not a fact or statistical data that someone owns. In case it is, citation becomes important.
• An important thing to take care of is that you must cite sources in the correct style that is required according to the instructions. Styles including MLA, APA, Chicago and Harvard referencing are the most popular ones so make sure you are comfortable with these styles. If you are, you will not have to struggle with the formatting.

Just remember that plagiarism means stealing work of others and presenting it as your own in content. This will help you determine if something you do is being counted as plagiarized. With these tips regarding research and plagiarism, your writing journey will become excellent.

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