Example Of Plagiarism: Article Review

Our memories can become distorted by other people’s memories of the same event or by new information, especially when that new information is so similar to information already in storage.
This sentence is an example of plagiarised one. It was taken from the article available online and was not documented. We do not see any quotation marks, any citation. Without specific software we would not be able to find out that this sentence was plagiarized. From the first site we can decide that it is original as it has a specific point of view of the author who used general knowledge about the psychology.
We can correct the situation and cite the sentence properly. Usually, if writer borrowed more than 3 words in a row from other sources, the information should be quoted. Taking into the account that the topic “Memory” belongs to the subject Psychology, we can suggest to use APA style of referencing. In this case we can modify the sentence to the following:
In her article Kristen Ohlson stated: “Our memories can become distorted by other people’s memories of the same event or by new information, especially when that new information is so similar to information already in storage.” (Ohlson, 2014)
We have added the quotation marks, mentioned author of the opinion and indicated the author’s surname and a year of publication in brackets after the quotation was closed. In such case we also should mention the source on the reference page, indicating the author, year of publication, title of the article, journal/database it was published at, date of access and the link (if it was an online source). The reference would be the following:
Ohlson, K. (2014). Where do children’s earliest memories go? – Kristin Ohlson | Aeon Essays. Aeon. Retrieved 15 May 2016, from https://aeon.co/essays/where-do-children-s-earliest-memories-go
The first sentence could be intentional plagiarism – when student had to write a paper about the kid’s memory and he copied the sentence from the article on the similar topic into his assignment. It could be unintentional plagiarism – student has copied the information, but forgot to cite it properly or to paraphrase and indicate the author of the original idea.