hi, I'm struggling with my writing.

can somebody please clarify this with me,

I see the same sentence in papers, for example

"The pattern tends to increase with weight (Goll et al., 2003)."

The authors (for example Brown et al. 2005 and Guthrie, 2010) have written the same thing somewhere in their papers, is this plagiarism?

should the sentence somehow be re-phrased into something like

"The increase of pattern tends to occur with weight (Goll et al., 2003)"

then this is not plagiarism?

thanks very much
love satchi

Hi Satchi,

I may be wrong but plagiarism is when you're copying someone's work/words without acknowledging. If I found the same information from a different source or my own research and stated the same thing, I don't think it'd be plagiarism if that makes sense. It may be worth considering the context. If the sentence is found in the introduction for example, I'd expect some sort of reference added.

As for rephrasing, how about 'as the weight increases, so does the pattern'?

I'm sure there are other ways but my Monday morning brain can only think of this one for now...

No, this isn't plagiarism - obviously we are taught not to lift sentences straight from other people's work, but sometimes it is unavoidable. The sentence you are talking about is so short, it is difficult to reword it anyway. For example, the second version of the sentence that you have written actually doesn't read as well and makes the sentence more difficult to understand. Inevitably, sometimes people are going to repeat things that have been said before - it would be impossible to ensure that every sentence you write is completely unique!

If a much longer sentence had been repeated, then yes you might suspect plagiarism. It is difficult to say exactly where the line should be drawn and there are no hard and fast rules, but if it was only this one sentence that was repeated out of a whole manuscript, then no it is most definitely not plagiarism. If a number of sentences looked familiar then that might raise suspicions. Generally, you just have to make your own judgement call - I am sure some of the sentences in my thesis could be found in other people's work, but that doesn't mean I plagiarised them - it just means that we used the same way to describe something. It's tricky to define exactly, but as I said, f it was a long complex sentence that had been copied word for word then that would be plagiarism, but a very short phrase such as your example is probably just coincidence!

Smoobles and Skig
thank you so much

love satchi