plagiarism

Contribution boundary

Record the specific expression, idea, method or artifact component whose origin or acknowledgment is disputed.

1. Which exact passages, claims, code units, images or other components are implicated, and in which version of the work? boundary
2. Is the allegation about copied expression, an appropriated idea, a method or another identifiable contribution? definition

Reuse profile

Record how the material was transformed and how much of the work's claimed contribution depends on it.

1. Does the comparison indicate verbatim copying, paraphrase, translation, mosaic assembly, adaptation or conceptual reuse? definition
2. What is the extent of the implicated material, using an explicit unit and denominator where appropriate? measurement
3. How does the implicated material support the work's central claim or claimed originality? boundary

Antecedent evidence

Record inspected source material, chronology and limits on what can be inferred about origin.

1. Which candidate sources have been inspected, and which exact versions contain the relevant contribution? provenance
2. What evidence establishes their chronology and distinguishes an originating source from an intermediary or later reproduction? provenance

Borrowing versus coincidence

Record evidence for derivation alongside plausible shared-source, conventional-form and independent-creation explanations.

1. Which distinctive correspondences support derivation beyond generic wording or routine structure? measurement
2. Could a shared source, required template, standard expression or independent development explain those correspondences? boundary
3. What evidence of access or transmission exists, and what remains unknown? provenance

Acknowledgment coverage

Record whether acknowledgment identifies both the source and the scope of the reused contribution.

1. What citation, quotation, caption, code notice or acknowledgment accompanies the implicated material in the examined version? provenance
2. Can the intended audience identify where the borrowed contribution begins and ends, including any verbatim wording? boundary

Claimed origin

Identify what the presenter claimed as their own or as new, including cases involving their prior work.

1. What explicit statement or submission context presents the implicated contribution as the presenter's own or newly produced work? provenance
2. If the contribution comes from the presenter's prior work, what prior-use disclosure was made and what specific disclosure requirement applies? boundary

Attribution rule

Record the rule used to evaluate the act, including relevant exceptions and treatment of intent.

1. Which identifiable policy, instruction or convention governed attribution when and where the work was presented? provenance
2. How does that standard treat common knowledge, routine expressions, authorized collaboration and reuse of prior work? boundary
3. Does the standard make intent relevant to classification, consequences or both, and what evidence addresses it? definition

Supported assessment

Record which elements of the applicable standard are supported, disputed or unresolved.

1. Which required elements are supported by inspected evidence, and which rely only on a detector output or an unverified allegation? measurement
2. What explanation or counterevidence has the person concerned supplied, or is their response still unavailable? provenance
3. Who may make the determination, and what assessment status is justified pending that decision? action

Attribution repair

Record proposed remedies, their justification and the authority needed to carry them out.

1. Would corrected citation, quotation boundaries, contribution credit or prior-use disclosure address the identified presentation problem? action
2. What further review or action is required if attribution repair cannot resolve the issue, and who is authorized to undertake it? action

Correction versus closure

Record what changed in the work and whether the allegation or determination remains open.

1. Which implicated components were corrected in which version, and what inspection confirms that the correction addresses them? provenance
2. Does the authorized reviewer regard the case as resolved, contested or still open despite the correction? action
3. Which circulated versions or affected audiences still require an authorized correction or notice? boundary

Kinds and varieties

Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.

• Verbatim (direct/clone) plagiarism: word-for-word copying without quotation and attribution
• Mosaic plagiarism / patchwriting: stitching phrases or sentence structures from one or more sources into ostensibly original text
• Paraphrase plagiarism: restating another's ideas while keeping their content, and often their structure, without credit
• Idea and structure plagiarism: taking concepts, arguments, or organisation without taking the wording
• Translation plagiarism: rendering a source from another language as original work
• Self-plagiarism / text recycling: reusing one's own previously submitted or published material as if it were new
• Contract cheating / ghostwriting (global or complete plagiarism): submitting an entire work produced by someone else, paid or unpaid
• Source-based plagiarism: invented, unread, secondary-as-primary, or otherwise misleading citations

1. Which of these kinds and varieties hold for the sense of plagiarism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance

Identifiers and schemes

Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.

• ISO 5127 vocabulary term - plagiarism (as defined in ISO 5127 / ČSN ISO 5127-2003: presenting another author's intellectual work, borrowed or imitated in whole or in part, as one's own) - A documentation-vocabulary entry, not a taxonomic code; the 2003 Czech adoption is the edition cited in the source actually read. Wikidata Q-id was not confirmed in this pass and is omitted.
• US Public Health Service research-misconduct category - plagiarism within FFP (fabrication, falsification, plagiarism), 42 CFR Part 93 as administered by the Office of Research Integrity - ORI's operational wording: appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.

1. Which of these identifiers and schemes hold for the sense of plagiarism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance

Standards and regulation

Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.

• US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Research Integrity - 42 CFR Part 93 (Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct), treating plagiarism as one of the three core research-misconduct offences
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) - position statements and flowcharts on suspected plagiarism in submitted and published articles, and on acceptable levels of duplication
• ISO 5127 (Information and documentation - vocabulary), as nationally adopted e.g. ČSN ISO 5127-2003, which defines the term for documentation practice
• Journal and publisher research-integrity policies that implement COPE, e.g. PLOS Ethical Publishing Practice (screening with Crossref Similarity Check / iThenticate; text-recycling rules)
• Institutional academic-integrity / honour codes and student-misconduct procedures (Stanford, Yale, Princeton and others, as summarised in the Wikipedia survey of campus definitions)
• Copyright, moral-rights, unfair-competition, fraud, and contract law, which can attach to the same facts but do not generally name 'plagiarism' as a statutory offence

1. Which of these standards and regulation hold for the sense of plagiarism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance

Real-world use

Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.

• Universities screen student coursework with text-matching services (Turnitin and similar) and then adjudicate matches through academic-misconduct panels, with sanctions from a failed assignment to expulsion
• Journals and publishers run submitted manuscripts through Crossref Similarity Check / iThenticate; confirmed plagiarism can mean rejection, correction, or retraction
• Newsrooms treat unattributed lifting as a journalistic-ethics breach; reporters are typically suspended pending investigation and may be dismissed
• Wikipedia moderation (e.g. CopyPatrol plus iThenticate) flags unattributed text and copyright problems on edits
• Research-integrity offices investigate alleged plagiarism of ideas, methods, or wording in grants, theses, and papers
• Students and researchers encounter it as a citation-and-paraphrase skill they are taught, and as a detection report they must interpret

1. Which of these real-world use hold for the sense of plagiarism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance

Typical measurements

Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.

• Text-similarity / overlap index from matching software - No accepted numeric cutoff; COPE advises against using a percentage as the investigation trigger. Nature, location, and concentration of the match matter more than the score - percent of submitted text matching a reference corpus
• Contiguous duplicated span - From isolated boilerplate phrases (often tolerated in methods) to whole paragraphs or sections (usually investigated) - words or sentences of continuous overlap
• Number of matched source documents - One source (clone/copy) versus many (mosaic/mashup); count alone does not decide the case - count of sources

1. Which of these typical measurements hold for the sense of plagiarism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance

Failure modes and hazards

Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.

• A similarity percentage is treated as a finding of plagiarism, producing false accusations on methods boilerplate, common phrases, or legitimate thesis-to-paper reuse
• False negatives: paraphrase, synonym substitution, translation, idea theft, contract cheating, and much AI-generated text evade source-matching
• AI-writing detectors used as dispositive proof, despite being non-specific; contested in student-conduct hearings (e.g. Newby v. Adelphi University as reported)
• Detection corpora are stronger for high-resource languages, so work in smaller languages is both less well screened and more easily missed
• Confirmed plagiarism can retract papers, end academic appointments, fail or expel students, and destroy journalistic credibility
• If plagiarism becomes routine in assessed work, the associated qualification no longer certifies the learning it claims to

1. Which of these failure modes and hazards hold for the sense of plagiarism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance

Regional variation

Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.

• In US and much Anglophone practice, plagiarism is primarily an institutional ethics offence, not a named crime; the same facts may still support copyright, fraud, or contract claims
• Continental European droit d'auteur / moral-rights systems can give the original author a legal remedy for unattributed use even when a US-style copyright analysis would not
• Czech copyright law (as reported) does not define plagiarism, whereas neighbouring systems such as German law are described as using the concept more directly
• Anglo-American assessment culture expects marked originality and citation; some pedagogical traditions treat close imitation as legitimate apprenticeship, which collides with imported integrity codes
• Text-matching tools and publisher workflows are built around large English and other high-resource corpora, so detection practice is uneven by language

1. Which of these regional variation hold for the sense of plagiarism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance

Neighbouring kinds and how to tell them apart

Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.

• Copyright infringement - Ask whether exclusive rights of a copyright holder were used without licence. Plagiarism is a false claim of authorship or unearned credit; it can occur in public-domain or licensed text, and infringement can occur without any authorship claim.
• Piracy / unauthorised copying - Piracy copies or distributes a work without permission but typically still presents it as the original author's. Plagiarism requires appropriation of authorship.
• Proper quotation and citation - If the borrowed words are marked as quotation (or clearly paraphrased) and the source is given, the originality-and-credit test for plagiarism is not met.
• Common knowledge - Material a typical member of the intended audience would already know without a source need not be cited; the test is audience knowledge, not the writer's memory.
• Cryptomnesia - The writer believes the material is original after unconscious recall. Academic policy may still treat the product as plagiarism; the psychological test is belief, the integrity test is missing credit.
• Duplicate publication / text recycling of one's own work - The source is the same author. It is dishonest about novelty, not theft of another's work; many specialists prefer 'redundant publication' or 'text recycling' to 'self-plagiarism'.
• Authorised ghostwriting - A speechwriter or named contributor working under an agreed disclosure or disciplinary convention is not presenting the work as the ghost's original assessed authorship; a student essay mill is.
• Fabrication or falsification - Those invent or alter data or results. Plagiarism takes existing work; the three are the FFP triad and can co-occur (e.g. fake citations).

1. Which of these neighbouring kinds and how to tell them apart hold for the sense of plagiarism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance