Plagiarism

Draft

Definition

“Plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement. Unlike cases of forgery, in which the authenticity of the writing, document, or some other kind of object itself is in question, plagiarism is concerned with the issue of false attribution. (Wikipedia, retrieved 16:34, 25 March 2008 (MET))”

Plagiarism is one form of academic dishonesty. A related form is contract cheating, i.e. someone else produces the work.

Remediation

Plagiarism most often occurs when learners are left alone to produce a term paper. When properly scenarized with a good project-oriented instructional design model, risks are lower.

Here is a short list of things to consider (see also Dealing with contract cheating:

• Turn assignments into real personalized projects
• Change subject areas (i.e. paper topics) for each course
• Require step-wise delivery, lists of themes, goals, questions, resources etc.
• Tell students that prior work must be considered and that citations are encouraged, but also announce that you will use plagiarism detection software.
• Have students present their paper and ask them tough questions.

Tools

Commercial online

• turnitin.com (commercial)
• Ephorus (commercial, can integrate with some portals, e.g. Blackboard, Moodle or Dokeos LMSs.
• Urkund (commercial)

Free

• WCopyfind examines a collection of document files. Can handle text, html, and some wordprocessor formats.
• Use a search engine like Google and just copy/paste some particularly well written sentence. First within quotes, then without quotes. This btw. also works for computer code.

Links

Overviews

• Plagiarism (Wikipedia)
• Plagiarism detection

(Wikipedia)

• Academic dishonesty
• Contract cheating

About tools

• Deja Vu: a Database of Highly Similar and Duplicate Citations

Good sources

Let's assume you want to plagiarize:

• Essay mill
• Paper mills at Urkund
• Google Scholar

References

• Robert Clarke & Thomas Lancaster (2007-05-13). Eliminating the successor to plagiarism? Identifying the usage of contract cheating sites.. JISC Plagiarism Advisory Service/jiscpas.ac.uk.

• Maurer, Hermann; Kappe, Frank and Bilal Zaka (2006). 'Plagiarism - A Survey, Journal of Universal Computer Science, 12 (8), 1049-1084. HTHML/PDF/PS

• Page, James. 2004. 'Cyber-pseudepigraphy: A New Challenge for Higher Education Policy and Management'. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management. 26(3), 429-433; HTML