IRM1501
Portfolio Examination
2021 September
, QUESTION 1
The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarism as the “action or practice of plagiarising; the
wrongful appropriations or purloining, and publication as one’s own, of the ideas, or expression of
the ideas … of another”. Furthermore, it is “fraud that occurs when a researcher steals the ideas or
writings of another or uses them without citing the source”.1 There are different forms of
plagiarism: 1. It arises in situations where a researcher fails or omits to indicate clearly, for example
with quotation marks or indent and different font, phrases or passages taken verbatim, that is, word
for word, from a published or unpublished text, without crediting the original text and author. 2. It
occurs in cases where a statute, case law, book, article, or electronic text is paraphrased without
acknowledging the source or sources and the author thereof. 3. It arises in circumstances where
more than a substantial part of or the entire statute, case law, book, article, or electronic text is
used.2