10 major differences between intentional and unintentional plagiarism
| Basis of comparison | Intentional Plagiarism | Unintentional Plagiarism |
| 1. Knowledge | The person is knowingly taking or using someone else’s work without permission and without proper acknowledgement. | The person is not aware of the fact that his or her action constitutes plagiarism, usually ignorant of citation requirements. |
| 2. Motive | The motive here is usually to deceive like someone passing on another person’s work as his or her own to avoid time or effort. | Due to miscommunications or errors, such as poor paraphrasing or referencing. |
| 3. Sources | Sources are not used or altered so that the reader will not realize that the work done is not original. | The individual might use sources but forget to write in-text citation or not use the correct referencing. |
| 4. Reference Format | A person often fails to cite, or deliberately decide to plagiarize, owing to the work of citation. | Mostly due to unawareness of citation rules, such as confusion between APA and MLA style or poor formatting. |
| 5. Degree | Whole sections of the text, paragraphs, and in some cases, the entire paper is copied. | Offenses in minor form, such as a bad paraphrased sentence or missing a quotation mark. |
| 6. Motivation | With the motive of getting work done quickly without doing much, scoring better grades or impressing without trying. | Intends to capture research and support but knows how to do it wrongly. |
| 7. Detection Reaction | She/he claims that is not her/his doing or gives some kind of excuse. | Generally she/he reacts with shock or regret when the person realizes that they made a mistake and will sometimes attempt to rectify it immediately. |
| 8. Quality of Paraphrasing | Generally, it is characterized by verbatim copying with little or no attempt to paraphrase the text. | Sometimes, characterized by attempts to paraphrase but still almost word for word with the original text. |
| 9. Consequences | Generally, it carries stricter punishments such as failing grades, suspension, or even expulsion because of the deceitful intention. | Consequences may be minor, such as resubmission opportunities or a warning, because the act is viewed as part of the learning experience |
| 10. Illustrations | The copy and paste of an article and not even citing, paying someone to write the paper, taking another student’s work. | Quoting a direct quote and forgetting quotation marks, not paraphrasing using the same sentence composition or forgetting to use a citation marker. |