Plagiarism – An Ethical Issue

Academic dishonesty or plagiarism is a growing problem in to days digital world. This article examines different aspects of plagiarism and introduces students, research scholars to plagiarism, its ill effect and the much more anti plagiarism software devoted to this important issue. Plagiarism by students and researchers in academic and research institutions is an old activity but ever growing problem. The wide use and availability of electronic resources makes it easy for students, authors and even academic people to access and use any piece of information and embed it into his/her own work without proper citation and has made plagiarism a bigger problem in academia. This article also elaborate reasons for increase in plagiarism cases, how to avoid plagiarism, pros and cons of plagiarism and prevention. Use of plagiarism detection tools such as Turnitin and Ithenticate can not only prevent but also assist faculty to fight this form of academic dishonesty and accelerate writing skill. In this article various anti-plagiarism tools play an important role and the advantages and disadvantages of using this automated text-matching software are discussed and analysed in brief.