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 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 pages / year including a PhD thesis.

Remediation and prevention strategies

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.

Plagiarism in cultural contexts

Handa and Power (2005) note that plagiarism of foreign students if often associated with their poor language skills and they argue that academic integrity and plagiarism by students from a different than western culture needs to be addressed in specific ways. In their study, the authors found ,for example, that

• referencing is neither expected nor taught in undergraduate classes in the Indian context.
• “in an Indian context, lack of integrity (cheating) had nothing to do with referencing and acknowledging ideas and words from books and authors. Ideas and even words of well known writers and philosophers are considered as part of the collective bank of knowledge and learners are supposed to make use of these to learn and develop new knowledge.” (p.74)
• in a similar vein, the act of writing itself differs, i.e. in some cultures it is perfectly acceptable to build sentences from phrases in books that are viewed as "common goods" (Pennycook 1996)
• “students taught to base their writing on books and other writers’ texts to get a good mark may have a different concept of plagiarism” (p.75)

Tools

Commercial online

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

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

French commercial

• Pompotron (supporte txt, pdf, doc, rtf, ppt, html). In french Renvoye le rapport par email, micropayment.
• Compliatio.net

Free online software

(may include commercial extensions)

• Plagtracker. Free online webservice. Can check full papers as well as fragments. Can compare to 5 million academic papers as well as all (or most) Internet pages. (added 14:24, 24 September 2012 (CEST)).

Free software

English texts

• WCopyfind examines and compares a collection of document files. Can handle text, html, and some wordprocessor formats. Only useful once you identified possible sources of plagiarism.

Multilingual texts

• 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 plagiarism

• MOSS. A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism. Free for non-commercial use, subscription needed.

Links

Links of links

• Electronic Plagiarism Seminar
• Plagiarism Detection (JISCipas)
• Internet: Fraude et déontologie selon les acteurs universitaires

Overviews

• plagiarism by Bruce Arnold. Good overview. See also term paper mills and incidents.
• Plagiarism (Wikipedia)
• Plagiarism detection

(Wikipedia)

• Academic dishonesty
• Contract cheating

Detection tool indexes

• detection sites and software, Electronic Plagiarism Seminar. Syracuse, NY: Noreen Reale Falcone Library, Le Moyne College, 2004, retrieved 17:42, 25 March 2008 (MET).
• Plagiarism resources

Databases

• 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

• Proceedings of the 2nd International Plagiarism Conference (2004)
• Proceedings of the 2nd International Plagiarism Conference (2006). Open access !

• 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