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EDITORIAL COMMENTARY
Literal and Intelligent Plagiarism: Students Beware!
Academic plagiarism has become like a viral fever that
can affect even a healthy person if sufficient preventive
measures are not taken. Untrained research students,
who need to write good quality research papers under
tight time constraints, are usually the victims. It is not
uncommon for research supervisors to experience a psy‑
chological burden while approving the student’s paper
for submission to a journal or a conference. Who knows if
a sentence copied by the student while writing a research
paper may be detected years later, subjecting the research
supervisor to a great embarrassment. When the supervi‑
sor asks them to be careful about plagiarism, the students
may also feel that they are being treated with suspicion.
Let us look at how incautious writing of a research paper
can lead us to this potential plagiarism risks.
You write a research paper when your experiments are
complete and you feel that the results are unique and a
significant advancement in knowledge. Research papers
typically contain an abstract, an introduction, experimen‑
tal details, and analysis of results including tables and
figures, conclusions, and a list of references. Preparing
figures or tables, analyzing the results and making con‑
clusions are the easier tasks of writing a research paper
since you must have spent a couple of years working
on the problem. However, writing the introduction of
the paper is the most difficult task and is often written
at the end just to make sure that no important points of
rationale that support your work are left out. The reader
should get an overall picture and important highlights of
your contribution after reading the introduction so that
he is enticed to delve further into your paper.
In the introduction, you briefly survey the field, and
identify the limitations of the known approaches to justify
why you have taken up the current research problem.
You then go on to state the results you have obtained and
why they are important in the present context. You may
also highlight the limitations of your work in the broader
context. In my view, writing the introduction part of a
research paper is not easy because this is where you are
making that emphatic selling point for your research. Stu‑
dents are generally clueless on writing the introduction to
the research paper since it requires taking a broader view
of the research area. This invariably leads them to read a
variety of published papers to look for leads on how to
build their case as the most novel and original idea with
respect to the knowledge already known.
IETE TECHNICAL REVIEW | Vol 29 | ISSUE 3 | MAY-JUN 2012
Borrowing a few words from others’ sentences to beau‑
tify the sentences in your own manuscript by itself cannot
be called plagiarism as long as you have not borrowed
the ideas. However, students whose native language is
not English or those who are not fluent in English are
tempted to use the easier way of “copying and pasting”
of entire sentences. This is called literal plagiarism. The
introduction of a thesis or a research paper is the one
where you will find most cases of literal plagiarism.
Even if cosmetic changes are made in the sentences, it
does not keep you from being called a plagiarist. Let me
illustrate this with an example. The following sentences
are from my research paper.
Original text: Bipolar transistors exhibit a number of sig‑
nificant advantages such as well‑controllable character‑
istics, high speed, high gain, and low output resistance.
These are excellent properties for mixed‑signal circuit
design and analog amplifiers. An emergent trend in
modern high‑density Very Large Scale Integrated circuits
is the integration of bipolar transistors with complemen‑
tary metal‑oxide‑semiconductor (CMOS) technology on
thin silicon‑on‑insulator (SOI).
Let us say an author copies the above text in his paper
with slight modifications (in italics) as given below.
Copied text with minor modifications: Bipolar transis‑
tors show a number of significant advantages such as
well‑controllable characteristics, high gain, high speed,
and small output resistance. These are useful characteristics
for mixed‑signal circuit design and analog amplifiers.
A modern trend in high‑density VLSI circuits is the inte‑
gration of bipolar transistors with CMOS technology on
thin silicon‑on‑insulator (SOI).
Carefully check the above two paragraphs. There are
only a few changes in the choice of words. The modi‑
fied and copied text will still be considered as literal
plagiarism if the original source is not cited at the end
of the copied text. I would even suggest that you put
the modified and copied text in quotes or in italics and
cite the original reference. This is to make sure that the
reader is aware that the material has been taken from
a different source. But this does not mean that you put
every sentence in a written paragraph in quotes followed
by a reference. This indeed has happened with one of
my students. He brought a manuscript in which every
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Kumar MJ: Literal and Intelligent Plagiarism – Students Beware!
alternate sentence is in quotes followed by a reference
number. Such a collection of quotes does not lead to any
original intellectual contribution and looks awkward.
If you examine the original text given above, it has three
sentences. The first/second sentence is a general ­statement
about bipolar transistors and therefore is standard stuff.
However, the third sentence conveys an idea or a thought
attributable to the original author. Only an expert working
in the field could say it authoritatively. When the student
copies a statement or thought from another paper because
that sentence perfectly conveys what the student wanted
to say, there is another danger. You might have copied
an idea too along with the language of the sentence. You
might not have used this idea in your paper. However, you
have failed to acknowledge that the original author is the
one who has presented that point of view. This is called
idea adoption. If the plagiarist tries to hide the original
source to represent the idea as his own during the idea
adoption, it leads to intelligent plagiarism.
What we tend to forget is that it is not possible for two
different human beings to exactly write the same set of
sentences on a given idea. If you have watched a nice
movie and wanted to convey the story to your friend, I am
sure you would tell it in your own words. We can similarly
summarize a written text without the need to copy from
the original source. Let me re‑write my original text given
above to illustrate how you can avoid literal plagiarism.
Modified text: The significant advantages of bipolar tran‑
sistors are (i) well‑controllable characteristics, (ii) high
speed, (iii) high gain, and (iv) low output resistance.
These benefits make them highly useful in mixed‑signal
and analog amplifier circuit design. Integration of bipolar
transistors with complementary metal‑oxide‑semicon‑
ductor (CMOS) technology on thin silicon‑on‑insulator
(SOI) is an emerging trend in modern high‑density VLSI
integrated circuits.
182
While there is no literal plagiarism in the above para‑
graph, the view‑point expressed in the last sentence
needs a citation of the original source although the
view‑point is re‑written. However nicely you may sum‑
marize an idea of another author, you must remember
that the idea is not yours and must, therefore, acknowl‑
edge the original source. Failure to do so can land you
in intelligent plagiarism which is even more malicious
compared to literal plagiarism.
Students beware! When you indulge either in literal
plagiarism or intelligent plagiarism either knowingly
or unknowingly, you are putting all the authors in the
manuscript at risk. Detection of plagiarism after publish‑
ing the paper can result in serious consequences to the
organization where you work, and can severely damage
your reputation and that of the co‑authors.
Academic institutes should evolve an enforceable policy
defining the boundaries between fair use and plagiarism
and make this policy widely available to their commu‑
nities via their websites. This plagiarism policy should
help the academic communities in improving their
self‑awareness about (i) what constitutes plagiarism
and (ii) the consequences of plagiarism. Providing easy
access to plagiarism detection tools through campus
wide licensing will make it easier both for the students
and the faculty to keep out of situations that can be clas‑
sified as plagiarism.
We need to recognize that while plagiarism is bad, we
can definitely prevent it from happening through good
practices.
M. Jagadesh Kumar
NXP (Philips) Chair Professor,
Department of Electrical Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India
IETE TECHNICAL REVIEW | Vol 29 | ISSUE 3 | MAY-JUN 2012
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Kumar MJ: Literal and Intelligent Plagiarism – Students Beware!
AUTHOR
M. Jagadesh Kumar was born in Mamidala, Andhra
Pradesh, India. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees
in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT), Madras, India.
From 1991 to 1994, he performed postdoctoral
research on the modeling and processing of high‑speed
bipolar transistors at the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada. While
with the University of Waterloo, he also did research on amorphous‑silicon
thin‑film transistors. From July 1994 to December 1995, he was initially with
the Department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering,
IIT, Kharagpur, India, and then, he was with the Department of Electrical
Engineering, IIT, New Delhi, India, where he became an Associate Professor
in July 1997 and has been a Full Professor in January 2005. He is currently the
Chair Professor of the NXP (Philips) (currently, NXP Semiconductors India Pvt.
Ltd.) established at IIT Delhi by Philips Semiconductors, The Netherlands. He
is the Coordinator of the Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Design, Tools,
and Technology interdisciplinary program at IIT Delhi. He is also a Principal
Investigator of the Nano‑scale Research Facility at IIT Delhi.
His research interests include nanoelectronic devices, device modeling,
and simulation for nanoscale applications, integrated‑circuit technology,
and power semiconductor devices. He has published extensively in these
areas of research with three book chapters and more than 150 publications
in refereed journals and conferences. His teaching has often been rated as
outstanding by the Faculty Appraisal Committee, IIT Delhi.
Dr. Kumar is a fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, The
National Academy of Sciences, India, and the Institution of Electronics and
Telecommunication Engineers (IETE), India. He is recognized as a Distinguished
Lecturer of the IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS). He is a member of the
DOI: 10.4103/0256-4602.98858; Paper No. TR 282_12; Copyright © 2012 by the IETE
IETE TECHNICAL REVIEW | Vol 29 | ISSUE 3 | MAY-JUN 2012
EDS Publications Committee and the EDS Educational Activities Committee.
He is an Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTRON DEVICES and an
Associate Editor of IEEE Technology News. He was the lead Guest Editor
for the following: 1) the joint special issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
ELECTRON DEVICES and the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NANOTECHNOLOGY
(November 2008 issue) on Nanowire Transistors: Modeling, Device Design,
and Technology and 2) the special issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
ELECTRON DEVICES on Light Emitting Diodes (January 2010 issue). He is the
Editor‑in‑Chief of the IETE Technical Review and an Associate Editor of the
Journal of Computational Electronics. He is on the editorial board of Recent
Patents on Nanotechnology, Recent Patents on Electrical Engineering, Journal
of Low Power Electronics, and Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.
He has reviewed extensively for different international journals.
He was a recipient of the 29th IETE Ram LalWadhwa Gold Medal for his
distinguished contribution in the field of semiconductor device design
and modeling. He was also the first recipient of the India Semiconductor
Association–VLSI Society of India TechnoMentor Award given by the
India Semiconductor Association to recognize a distinguished Indian
academician for playing a significant role as a Mentor and Researcher. He
is also a recipient of the 2008 IBM Faculty Award. He was the Chairman
of the Fellowship Committee of The Sixteenth International Conference
on VLSI Design (January 4–8, 2003, New Delhi, India), the Chairman of
the Technical Committee for High Frequency Devices of the International
Workshop on the Physics of Semiconductor Devices (December 13–17,
2005, New Delhi), the Student Track Chairman of the 22nd International
Conference on VLSI Design (January 5–9, 2009, New Delhi), and the
Program Committee Chairman of the Second International Workshop
on Electron Devices and Semiconductor Technology (June 1–2, 2009,
Mumbai, India).
For more details, please visit http://web.iitd.ac.in/~mamidala
E-mail: mamidala@ee.iitd.ac.in
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