Plagiarism is a form of intellectual dishonesty. It involves either unintentionally using someone else’s work without properly acknowledging where the ideas or information came from (the most common form of plagiarism) or intentionally passing off someone else’s work as your own (the most serious form of plagiarism).

Plagiarism is based on the notion of copyright, or ownership of a document or an idea. Like a patent, which protects an invention, a copyright protects an author’s investment of time and energy in the creation of a document. Essentially, it assures authors that someone else won’t be able to steal ideas from their work and profit from that theft without penalty.

In this sense, plagiarism in academic writing differs in important ways from the kind of mixing and remixing that can take place in popular culture. The expectations of readers and writers differ in important ways from those of composers and listeners. Musicians, for example, often use other songs as springboards or inspiration for their own work, sometimes sampling other songs or creating mixes. Writers of books, magazine articles, or academic journal articles, in contrast, don’t have that freedom. Readers would be surprised to find an unattributed passage that they recognize as the work of another writer, while writers would be alarmed if they came across an unattributed passage of their own in someone else’s document. In general, writers are pleased when someone else quotes their work. But they are quick to take offense — and have good reason to do so — when another writer uses their work without giving proper credit. Context matters, and in this case the context of academic writing differs significantly from that of popular culture.