UB Chemnitz
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The most common forms of plagiarism

It is a common form of plagiarism to copy foreign texts into scientific works without citing the source:

  1. Text plagiarism: The literal adoption of one or more text passages without corresponding source reference.
  2. Idea plagiarism: The reproduction or paraphrasing of a train of thought, whereby words and the sentence structure of the original are changed in such a way that the origin of the thought is blurred.
  3. The translation of ideas and text passages from a foreign-language work, again without citing the source.
  4. The adoption of metaphors, idioms or elegant linguistic creations without citing the source.
  5. Plagiarism of quotations: the use of quotations found in a work of secondary literature to support one's own argument, whereby the quotations themselves are documented, but not the secondary literature used.