Plagiarism is commonly defined as representing as one’s own the ideas and/or writing of another. This includes using another author’s sentences or paragraphs, or significant portions thereof, without quotation marks and an appropriate citation, and conveying information that is not commonly known without citing the authors whose original discovery or insight that information represents.

Suppose an engineering student reads the following from a published paper while preparing an essay:

"In this paper, we investigate the survivability of mobile wireless communication networks in the event of base station (BS) failure. A survivable network is modeled as a mathematical optimization problem in which the objective is to minimize the total amount of blocked traffic. We apply Lagrangean relaxation as a solution approach and analyze the experiment results in terms of the blocking rate, service rate, and CPU time. The results show that the total call blocking rate (CBR) is much less sensitive to the call blocking probability (CBP) threshold of each BS when the load is light, rather than heavy; therefore, the more traffic loaded, the less the service rate will vary." Kuo-Chung Chu and Frank Yeong-Sung Lin, 2006. Survivability and performance optimization of mobile wireless communication networks in the event of base station failure. Computers and Electrical Engineering 32: 50-64.