Mar 9, 2022
How to Avoid Self-Plagiarism?
Self-plagiarism is not necessary to be removed for the thesis, however, we need it later to reproduce the text for the purpose of reporting or related studies etc
While writing my PhD dissertation, I came across self-plagiarism. After publishing my first articles, I checked the thesis for plagiarism and at that time it was showing massive plagiarism. This was a big issue because I was about to submit my thesis for plagiarism and at the same time, it was creating issues. These were my own words, my own ideas, but the supervisor told me to take them out before submitting the paper.
Self-plagiarism is not necessary to be removed for the thesis, however, we need it later to reproduce the paragraphs for the purpose of reporting or related studies etc.
Plagiarism of this magnitude does not look good in a doctoral thesis. So I was thinking at the time about how I could get rid of it. I looked it up on the internet, googled it, and looked it up on YouTube, but none of the suggestions worked. All of these methods were unethical, and I do not believe that a PhD or master’s student should use them.
I decided to rewrite the thesis after failing to find a good technique. However, the issue was that time was short, and I was about to submit my thesis. Second, writing the entire thesis (roughly 200 pages) would be extremely difficult for me. Furthermore, it would be impossible to reproduce it in good language as I wrote it in the first sketch. It was also challenging to fit the entire thesis into the original framework. There would be no cohesion or coherence.
I used Grammarly and Google Translator to make my writing flow and eliminate typos as a non-native English writer. Therefore, I considered using Google Translator for this purpose.
Each paragraph was copied and pasted into Google Translate. The paragraph was first translated from English to French. I then translated it into Dutch from French. These languages were chosen because they have similar alphabets. It would not be better if I used Urdu or Arabic because I do not believe that these languages would produce a good result.
When I got the last paragraph in English, it was unstructured. It gave the same meaning as the original paragraph, however, it was in plain text. It was no longer formal or technical language.
The Google translator also translated the technical keywords into the normal language. For example, since I worked in cloud computing, it also translated cloud computing into normal terms that did not correspond to technical language.
Therefore, I used Grammarly once more. It is an excellent application for checking grammar and typos in your writing. You can’t rely on it entirely, but it can assist you if you don’t understand the English structure. I copied and pasted the same text into Grammarly. All keywords and technical terms were rewritten. I changed my language to be more technical and scientific. I double-checked it for various issues before copying it to my thesis.
It was a good alternative to using any kind of trick that would be unethical, as well as techniques that aren’t appropriate for use at the PhD or master's level. As a result, I believe it is an excellent method for replicating your document and rewriting your markup. Because you’re using it for your own work, it’s not unethical. It completely changes the sentence structure, and with just a little effort to switch to technical language, you can end up with a good paragraph, which leads to a well-written chapter.
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