Plagiarism is when someone fraudulently takes credit for someone else’s work as if it was their own. One of the main purposes of college is to further one education. By plagiarizing one is not fulfilling their potential to learn and become better in their education or workplace. Furthermore, it is dishonest and not honorable for one to commit such academic dishonesty. The effects of plagiarism would only lead to negative results. It could possibly follow an individual for the rest of their career. There are many ways and resources that can help avoid the act of plagiarism.
Academic dishonesty can affect your life in a negative way. When an individual plagiarizes, the outcome is never a good experience. Plagiarism is when someone fraudulently makes use of someone else’s work, and attempts to take credit for it as if it was their own. It is never good to take someone else’s thoughts or ideas and attempt to take credit for it. The consequences in the act of plagiarism can result in failure of an assignment or course, follow an individual for the rest of their career, and expelled from a college.
Plagiarism has effects on every type of profession and nursing career. There are lots of negative consequences which are associated with plagiarism. It results in loss of professional credibility. In a health institution where the nurses cannot be able to research on their own to determine improved methods of taking care of the patients, they perform poorly, and the patients will lose loyalty in them. The patients take too long to heal, and they keep on going back to the hospital which means they will end up looking for better care providers (In Peterkin and In Brett-MacLean, 2016). Considering that the healthcare business is now competitive, plagiarism will be a disadvantage in a hospital as customers will prefer where the nurses are authentic and performing the best.
College professors emphasize the consequences of plagiarizing on an assignment.
Plagiarism can affect your overall grade and cause an individual to fail for the semester. The conundrum of citing and the fear of plagiarizing on purpose or by accident is a major problem in the minds of one batch of students, according to a 2016 survey compiled by RefME, the online citation and bibliography generator. (Smedley, Crawford, & Cloete, 2015). Some students become overwhelmed with their work assignment and decide to take the easy way out. Plagiarism may also take place when a student procrastinates in completing an assignment.
When the nurses are using plagiarized work, and they are discovered, they can get fired or their pay suspended. The punishment will be dependent on the magnitude of their mistake. There are court cases which are made against nurses who have plagiarized other people’s works and in such a case they are required to pay a fine or jailed for a period. The institution that such as individual works for is usually implicated and they lose their loyalty as well as their customers. In such a case, the hospital can decide to lay off the worker or suspend their payment for a period to pay for the damages (Brink, Van and Van, 2007).
Imprisonment is a common punishment for severe copyright infringement issues. There are nurses who are assigned the duty of researching the healthcare. They are expected to ensure that their work is original and it can be used in the hospital to improve the operations. There are nurses who are known to take another work which was presented in the past by another author (Lipson, 2008). Such work is not original, and it does not improve the operations of the business. However, the author had the right to file a court case and made a case against the hospital and nurses who copied their work without permission.
The professional license or degree of the nurse may be revoked. The nurses are required to act ethically in everything starting with when using another author’s work when conducting their research. It is the duty of the nurse to make sure that when they are studying, they only use other resources as a referral and get some information which only will beneficial (Zgheib, 2015). When a license is revoked, it means that the nurse can no longer practice or be hired by a government organization. It affects the place of work in that the number of nurses is reduced which means that the institution has to through the hiring process again. When unethical nurses are associated with a medical institution, it affects the reputation and patients lose their belief in the organization (In Billings and In Halstead, 2016).
In my opinion, plagiarism is illegal. It is arguably the most deliberate act of intellectual property theft there is. There are tools to prevent the occurrence of plagiarism in a paper. There are also additional tactics a student may employ in their paper to eliminate traces of plagiarism, a primary example being the choice to not write two consecutive words exact from another piece of research. Paraphrasing is one way through which to avoid plagiarism. Quoting also gives the writer the chance to copy words exact, provided they acknowledge the original writer or researcher through an in-text citation and appropriate referencing. Another way to do so is to use summaries. This implies noting down the critical points a text in one’s own words. The summary can then provide the basis for rewriting something on the same topic, but with a whole different language. Using any of these three alternatives can easily prevent plagiarism cases from occurring repeatedly. To avoid the problem of plagiarism, learning peers and fellow students should ensure they cite an original author’s work in their research. Alternatively, they should use primary data that they have researched themselves. To ensure their work is plagiarism-free, students should use online tools that can point out areas they need to either take down, cite or replace with primary data.
In conclusion, plagiarism on education or nursing profession damages the prospects of the future profession. There is fear that there is no student who are willing to carry out their work such as research which may improve on education or nursing career as most just copy what has been done. It is unethical and an indication that such student or nurse are not willing to invest time to improve their operations. Plagiarism should thus be punished to avoid interfering with education or nursing. Interventions set up in place for improvement on education or nursing sector could do a great deal in improving success. Stringent measures should be set up for the sole reasons of punishing out student who deliver other peoples work (Smedley, Crawford, & Cloete, 2015). In the field such as that of the student’s, new research should be done so as to meet the ever changing dynamics of care. Thus, plagiarizing will only retain the old behaviors or manners of doing this which will lag the healthcare sector behind (Mansor, Ghazali, Abdul, Aliza, & Mohamed, 2015).
References
- Brink, H., Van, W. C., & Van, R. G. (2007). Fundamentals of research methodology for healthcare professionals. Kenwyn: Juta.
- In Billings, D. M. G., & In Halstead, J. A. (2016). Teaching in nursing: A guide for faculty. St. Louis, Missouri: Elsevier.
- In Peterkin, A., & In Brett-MacLean, P. (2016). Keeping reflection fresh: A practical guide for clinical educators. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press.
- Lipson, C. (2008). Doing honest work in college: How to prepare citations, avoid plagiarism, and achieve real academic success. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Mansor, M., Ghazali, S., Abdul, W., Aliza, W. N., & Mohamed, F. (2015). Plagiarism in Nursing Education. Malaysian Journal of Nursing, 6(2), 30-32.
- Smedley, A., Crawford, T., & Cloete, L. (2015). An intervention aimed at reducing plagiarism in undergraduate nursing students. Nurse Education in Practice, 15(3), 168-173
- Zgheib, P. (2015). Business ethics and diversity in the modern workplace. Hershey, PA: Business Science Reference, an imprint of IGI Global.
