Checking for Plagiarism

How to detect plagiarism by your writers and avoid getting sued (as an editor, you, too, can be sued)

Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash

Medium Support defines plagiarism as: “any act of taking the words and/or ideas of others and presenting them as original or without proper acknowledgement or permission. This includes directly copying ideas and text (whether entire articles, paragraphs, or sentences), as well as paraphrasing and slight re-writes (often known as “mosaic plagiarism”), and failure to cite sources.”

As an editor on Politically Speaking on Medium, I’ve detected plagiarism a couple of times in stories submitted to the publication.

• In one instance of this, the explanation I was given was that something was copied for reference but then was confused with original content. This would be possible, even probable. I, too, copy text from a source into a draft to use as a basis for writing an article, and on a few occasions have had to ferret out which parts of my draft were my research and which were my own writing.
• In the other instance, in which a writer copied an entire previously published article into a Medium draft without crediting the original author, it was easier to label the plagiarism as a deliberate transgression.