Students Must Use a Citation Checker for a Better Performance
Nowadays, most educational institutions give importance to research and analysis based learning, and hence they incorporate research papers within their curriculum. Many students who treasure their academic careers have the desire to produce a paper with original content.
It may happen that they have unknowingly committed an act of plagiarism. For that reason, the students must have a clear idea about plagiarism. The institutions identify the act of plagiarism as a challenge to their academic integrity.
Hence, they take steps against the students who plagiarize. The students may choose to use parts of another person’s writing in their work.
For that, they need to do proper citations. If they fail to cite their sources properly, that paper can have plagiarized contents. To avoid this, the students can use a citation checker.
Suppose the students do the wrong citation. That is also an instance of plagiarism. To produce quality original content, the students must take the help of a citation checker.
How Unintentional Plagiarism and Citation Is Related?
When the students write their papers, they may feel the need to strengthen their argument by using parts from already-existing works that they have used as reference material. For that, the students must put those lines within quotation marks and do a proper citation for the work.
If the students fail to cite the work or do a wrong citation, that may cause plagiarism. Any plagiarism tool identifies it as duplicate content. It may be unintentional, but the institution may take steps against the students based on their academic policies. They may give the student a failing grade or suspend the student.
If a blogger or content-writing uses some content from another site, it is essential to cite the source. Suppose the writer fails to cite the source of the reference material that is an instance of plagiarism.
If the writers or students use contents from the websites, they must mention the URL for citation. Without citation, the free online plagiarism checker identifies it as duplicate contents. To avoid this, the students and writers must use a citation checker before submitting their work.
How Fail to Cite Can Affect the Ranking of a Website?
When the writers or students fail to do a proper citation, the plagiarism checker works on the contents and identifies them as plagiarized. If a website has plagiarized content, it loses its credibility.
Search engines like Google work to improve their user experience. If any website has plagiarized content, search engines eliminate them from the search results as a penalty. It is a form of indirect penalty, and the site gets a lower SEO ranking.
This lower SEO ranking results in the loss of traffic. The writers and students can stay away from this sort of potential plagiarism by using a citation checker.
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Different Styles of Citation:
The writers ought to provide all relevant information about their sources for their work in the citation. The information must include the WH words like who, what, when, where, and other such words. For citations, the writers can use different styles. Some of the common citation styles are –
- APA (American Psychological Association) Citation Format:
APA format is an author-date style that includes the author’s name and the date of the publication. For online articles, the students can use page number or paragraph number. The students can also add the abbreviation of that paragraph in the citation.
Format: Author’s last name, First name, (Publication date), Title, URL
For citation of the website: Author’s last name, First initial, (year, month, date of publication), Title of the webpage, name of the website, URL
- Chicago Citation Format:
This format requires the information on the author, title of the book or the article, title of newspaper, publication year, month and date of publication, publisher, city of publication, date of access, page numbers, URL or name of webpage from which the writers are collecting their information.
General format: Author’s last name, author’s initial name, “Title of the work,” the title of the article, date published/ last modified/ last accessed, URL
- MLA (Modern Language Association) Citation Format:
The general format of MLA format is the author’s last name, author’s initial name, “Title of the work,” name of the journal/ webpage title/ blog post title, other information like volume, edition, publication date, page number, URL.
- IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Citation Format:
It is a standard citation method for papers dealing with technical fields. The general format includes the citation number within square brackets and all other bibliographical details like the author’s name, book titles are added in the citation.
How Do Citation Checkers Work?
Many students prefer to use an essay checker to identify the plagiarised contents present in their paper. It may happen their contents are getting identified as a plagiarised content only for improper or wrong citation.
To fix this, the students and writers must use a citation checker. The citation checker uses heuristics to identify the actual pattern of citation used within the work. The citations are checked and linked to their bibliographical reference used in the presentation.
The citation checker may then use a semantic fingerprint to compare the existing academic documents and determine if there is any mistake in the citation. If any document has hidden plagiarism, the citation checker tools can identify them.
Why Should Someone Use a Plagiarism Checker Before Submitting Their Paper?
The purpose of writing is to reach the reader, and if an article has duplicate content, it fails to reach the readers. The students who have duplicate content in their writing may get adversely affected by this.
The bloggers who use lines from another writer or webpage must do a proper citation. Without the citation, the website may get identified for having plagiarized content, and hence it can end up with a lower SEO rank.
The only defense against having duplicate content in an article is doing a proper citation. When the students or writers use a citation checker, it can identify the problems with citations. For a better result, they can use the Copyleaks Citation checker.