Plagiarism

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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 17:42, 25 March 2008 (MET))”

Plagiarism is one form of academic dishonesty. A related form is contract cheating, i.e. someone else produces the work. Kuro5hin has this interesting shadow scholar (2010) article, where a ghostwriter called Nathaniel Orenstam claims to have written about 5000 / year including a PhD thesis.

Remediation

Plagiarism most often occurs when learners are left alone to produce a term paper and/or if classes are too big. When properly scenarized with a good project-oriented instructional design model, risks seem to be much lower.

Here is a short list of strategies to consider (see also Wikipedia's dealing with contract cheating and Gretchen Pearson's Plagiarism and Anti-Plagiarism. Both retrieved 17:42, 25 March 2008 (MET)):

  • Turn assignments into real personalized projects (like mini-research projects).
  • Change subject areas (i.e. paper topics) for each course.
  • Require step-wise delivery, lists of themes, goals, questions, resources etc. Each of these must be reified as products and be discussed an evaluated. As an example see the C3MS project-based learning model.
  • In the same spirit, require an electronic research trail (e.g. have them use a wiki to work on concepts)
  • 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

No idea which one is best or which one offers best price/quality. - Daniel K. Schneider

French commercial

Free

English
  • WCopyfind examines a collection of document files. Can handle text, html, and some wordprocessor formats. Only useful once you identified possible sources of plagiarism.
Multilingual
  • CopyTracker. Free software to download (also available from source forge). Not tested, but currently seems to be the best (free) bet.
  • 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.
Software
  • MOSS. A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism. Free for non-commercial use, subscription needed.

Links

Links of links

Overviews

(Wikipedia)

Detection tool indexes

Databases

Good sources

Let's assume you want to plagiarize:

References

  • Badge, J. L., Cann, A. J., & Scott, J. (2007). To cheat or not to cheat? A trial of the JISC plagiarism detection service with biological sciences students. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 32(4), 1-7.
  • Clarke, Robert & Thomas Lancaster (2006), Eliminating the successor to plagiarism? Identifying the usage of contract cheating sites., 2nd International Plagiarism Conference, Newcastle upon Tyne, 19 - 21 June 2006, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumbria Learning Press.) HTML - Download
  • Maurer, Hermann; Kappe, Frank and Bilal Zaka (2006). 'Plagiarism - A Survey, Journal of Universal Computer Science, 12 (8), 1049-1084. HTHML/PDF/PS. This is good overview paper.
  • 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
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