Detecting Plagiarism

Introduction

        This workshop stresses the importance of preventing plagiarism. Once students understand what plagiarism is, have some opportunities to learn how to avoid it, and are given assignments designed to deter plagiarism, you will have to face the issue of detecting it much less frequently. Yet you may still sometimes find yourself facing the possibility that a student has appropriated someone else's words and wanting to determine whether your hunch is correct. Unfortunately, getting papers from the Internet may be quite easy, but detecting plagiarism is not. This module describes signals that a paper may be plagiarized and strategies for locating the online source of a plagiarized document.

        Many sites offer the opportunity to plagiarize, intentionally or unintentionally. Students who buy a paper off the Internet clearly intend to defraud. On the other hand, students who cut and paste from a site and intersperse the appropriated material with their own words may have no intention of defrauding.

        A wide variety of digital information sources offer opportunities for intentional or unintentional misappropriation of sources. Students may find materials in the library's proprietary databases, which in many cases offer full-text reproductions. Another example is the Amazon.com site, which offers book descriptions and reviews. A mountain of information is available on the free Web, from sites such as the Wall Street Journal. Students who subscribe to a password-protected site may have access to full text information that cannot be detected by searching the free Web. The faculty member could identify the plagiarized materials only by subscribing to the same sites. Finally, the explosion of online paper mills offers great temptations to a desperate student who has too little time to complete an assignment.

Evaluating The Possibility of Plagiarism

Albeit with no guarantees of success, a good Internet search may reveal sources of online plagiarism. But what are some of the signals that a paper may be plagiarized?

Formatting: Maybe the format does not follow the assignment, or maybe it is quite unusual--such as no paragraphs or headings, or peculiar, abrupt transitions between ideas. Be wary of website printout page numbers or dates, grayed-out letters, or an odd use of upper/lower case and capitalization.

Prose style: Be alert to advanced, specialized vocabulary or unusual sentence structure. But be aware that these are not sure signs of appropriated passages; writers do produce texts in which their own style shifts according to how comfortable and confident they are with a particular passage.

Quotations. Look for cues that the quotation is from an interview. Or does the paper contain quotations that have no bibliographic entries in the paper?

Your original assignment: Are the assignment guidelines followed? Did any of the assignment requirements get left out entirely? Do any of the parts of the paper seem to be "added on"? Out of place? Is the paper what you expected? Is it in the right style for the assignment's requirements?

Bibliography: Did the student use the proper citation format? Is it a format used at your university? Is the citation style followed consistently? If you assigned a paper in MLA style and you get a submission in perfect Chicago from a first-year student, you should make inquiries!

References: Check a selection of the references. In particular, make sure the materials cited actually have relevance to the paper itself. Sometimes the citations and actual article have no relevance to the points being made in the paper. If that is the case, plagiarism may be occurring. It is also important to check for references that are short or seem to be incomplete. These references may be fake and designed to give the appearance of completeness where it does not actually exist. If a suspicious paper lists print sources that are not available in your library, do not grade the paper until you have secured them through Interlibrary Loan. If your library holds the sources but they are mysteriously "missing," be very wary.

Online resources: Be wary of papers depending heavily on online sources--not those offered by the library, but those found on the "free" Web. Check the Web addresses given to ensure that the sites listed are working and relevant to the guidelines of the assignment.

Content: If the content of the paper changes suddenly and inexplicably, the writer may be copying extended passages.

Context: If the paper seems completely inappropriate to the assignment, it may be the work of a student who isn't connecting with the assignment--or the work of some other writer entirely. The same is true for cases in which you are seeing early drafts on one topic, and then a final paper on an entirely different topic.

Relevance: Does the bibliography contain references that seem unrelated to the topic of the paper? Is it a paper on Korea with references to Massachusetts (an actual case)? If so, it may be that the paper was originally created dealing with Massachusetts and "lifted" to fit the requirements of an assignment on Korea.

Faculty Websites on Plagiarism

Plagiarism matters to members of the academy, and several have posted extensive websites, e.g.,

• Heyward Ehrlich, Rutgers University http://newark.rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/plagiarism598.html

The following sites may prove useful in your handling of questionable student papers.

Internet Term Paper Sites

These busy enterprises offer papers to students. Most are for sale; some are for free. Some style themselves as heroic resisters to the oppression of academic life. Some quote from reviews of their site! Some sites offer to custom-write a term paper--for "research" purposes. A desperate student can visit one of these sites, make a hasty decision, and instantly be provided with a reassuring paper. Term paper mills existed before the Internet, but they involved a necessary lag time--either visiting them physically or contacting them through the U.S. Mail. Thus students who used them had to be very deliberately determined to cheat, and even then, they had plenty of time to reconsider their decision. The Internet sites today add a whole new realm of cheaters: those who would never make a calculated decision to buy a term paper but who, in a moment of desperation, would succumb to the temptation.

Research Sites and Databases:

Search Engines on the Free Web & Meta Search Tools

From a questionable paper, choose a search string of words and see if it comes up in another document available on the Web. Try to select a string of words that are distinctive. Meta Search Tools may save you some time because they search several search engines simultaneously. Again, use a search phrase or distinctive words. To decide which one to use, see:

Specialized Search Engines

Searching specialized search engines designed for specific disciplines may be useful. The San Antonio College Library hosts a site, maintained by John Deosdade, that provides topical lists of search engines. There you may find specialized search engines in your field. http://www.accd.edu/sac/lrc/john/searchen.htm

Internet Detection Services

The Internet not only offers sites that will sell term papers to students but also sites that will sell professors assistance in catching those students. Some eager capitalists sponsor sites that serve both the cheating students and the detective professors. The following sites advertise help for faculty endeavoring to prevent and/or detect plagiarism:
 
 

Plagiarism.com (http://plagiarism.com) offers three different software programs to deter or detect plagiarism. The first is the Glatt Plagiarism Teaching Program, which describes what it believes to be the possible types of plagiarism and shows students how to avoid accidental plagiarism. It also includes some self-detection exercises to help students understand when their writing is too close to the writing of the original author and some practice exercises to help students plagiarize less. It is one of the few products that offers a tutorial on plagiarism.

The second software program is the Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program. The screening program uses the "cloze method." (For a more detailed description of this technique, see http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~john.trollope/on_off/cloze.htm. For a critique of the cloze technique--and the Glatt program--see Howard (1995).) This program tests students on their recollection of their own papers. The test must be conducted within 5 days of the receipt of the paper, and the test asks the student to "fill in the blanks" for every few words of the paper. The theory is that writers can remember the language of a paper they wrote but will have difficulty filling in blanks created in a paper they did not write. Questionable in its premises from the outset (in a personal narrative, writers can probably fill in the blanks with ease, but what about researched papers in which writers are barely in control of the unfamiliar materials they are synthesizing?), this method is poorly suited to distance education, where it would be almost impossible to ensure that the student does not have access to the paper while completing the test itself.

The third product is the Glatt Self-Detection Program. This program also uses the cloze technique, but the students use it on themselves to see if they can remember their own papers. Students might misuse this program by "studying" for the screening and thereby increasing their chances of passing the screening test if asked to take it. However, it might also have the effect of discouraging plagiarism and helping students realize that they need greater familiarity with the ideas in their papers.

Plagiarism.org (iParadigms.com) (http://plagiarism.org) scours the Internet looking for papers and puts them in the site's database. In addition, plagiarism.org archives paper submissions by students whose faculty member used the service in the course of a class. So a faculty member can submit a suspected paper, and plagiarism.org will analyze it for the likelihood the paper is plagiarized. The ability of the site to detect plagiarism is directly related to the size and scope of its database. Plagiarism.org does not include journal literature from proprietary databases, material found in books, or materials available at sites that require prior registration. It is a powerful tool but by no means foolproof. In addition, plagiarism.org offers the following (taken verbatim from their website): "An instructor registers his/her class with Plagiarism.org. Each instructor then requests that his/her students upload their term papers or manuscripts to the TurnItIn.com web site. "2.Each student in the instructor's course accesses the TurnItIn.com web site. "3.From the web site students can upload their work into our database designed specifically for their particular class. Students can also access information regarding plagiarism and information concerning intellectual property. "4.Our proprietary technology converts each manuscript into an abstract representation; essentially, we 'finger-print' each paper. "5.Each term paper submitted for a class requirement is statistically checked against a database of other manuscripts collected from different universities, classes, and from all over the Internet. Onlycases of gross plagiarism are flagged. This means that papers using some identical quotes or papers written on similar topics will NEVER be flagged as unoriginal. "6.A report is then emailed to the instructor detailing the degrees of originality for each paper checked with Plagiarism.org via our iThenticate® technology." This process would have several advantages. From semester to semester, students would have difficulty reusing former students' papers, because their work would be compared to the database of previously submitted papers from the same course. In addition, this process would discourage the use of paper mills, because plagiarism.org checks paper mills. Finally, the process of handing in the paper to plagiarism.org would itself discourage plagiarism, because it demonstrates a faculty member's commitment to original work and provides a "check" of originality. The founders of plagiarism.org also think that honest students appreciate the use of this service because they do assigned work and think others should be expected to be accountable, too. A drawback (depending on one's pedagogical ethos) is that the use of this site notifies students that their instructor does not trust them--a good thing if the instructor is wanting to deter plagiarists who think their instructors are dopes; a bad thing if the instructor is wanting to establish a relationship of mutual trust and respect with his or her students.

IntegriGuard (http://www.integriguard.com) offers services similar to those of plagiarism.org. Faculty are assigned a password, students are asked to submit papers, and the site software checks the originality of the work against their database. The database for plagiarism.org appears larger and therefore more likely to analyze student submissions successfully. But IntegriGuard may include materials not available to plagiarism.org; hence you may want to search both databases.

Digital Integrity (http://www.findsame.com). The Digital Integrity site takes searching for text on the Internet to a new level. Digital Integrity offers the ability to insert large passages of text into a box provided at the site that is then matched against similar text on the Internet.  The ability to search for whole blocks of text is easier, and usually more successful, then word searching using Internet search engines.  This new service has great  potential for making plagiarism detection easier and faster.  Once a "match" has been found, the site returns the matching text in hyperlink format so the faculty member can investigate further and find the original site and material to determine if plagiarism has actually occurred.

Detecting Plagiarism- Conference Exercise 2 Dr. Adelphi receives a student's review on the book The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader: Becoming the Person Others Will Want to Follow by John Maxwell. The review includes the following passage: "In the view of the author, he believes that to be successful in life, every person needs four skills: 1) The ability to cultivate relationships with others; 2) The ability to equip and develop other people; 3) A positive attitude; and 4) Leadership ability. The Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is designed to help people develop their leadership skills. John Maxwell describes how he has taken everything he has learned from over thirty years of leadership in business and volunteer organizations, and has condensed it down to 21 timeless principles that anyone can use and apply, regardless of profession, culture, gender, or position. Maxwell makes a powerful argument that leadership is influence. Ignore a law of leadership, and you suffer the consequences. It's like dealing with the law of gravity. Your awareness of the laws of physics doesn't matter. Jump out of a window, and you must deal with the results of your actions. They are inevitable. The same is true of the laws of leadership. As Maxwell describes in his work, learn and follow the laws, and people will follow you. Violate or ignore them, and they won't." In earlier parts of the review, the student had grammatical problems and misspellings. Notwithstanding errors in subject-verb agreement, this section seems much more polished. Dr. Adelphi is suspicious. Using the search engines suggested above, check the authenticity of this passage. Do you find any evidence that it is plagiarized? Post your findings to the Detecting Plagiarism Conferences section of your Study Group.

 

Detecting Plagiarism- Conference Exercise 3 As part of an assignment on the symptoms of anorexia, Dr. Addison reads the following passage: "Children or adolescents with anorexia nervosa have a marked fear of gaining weight, becoming fat, or even of achieving a normal body weight, even though they are below their expected weight. Their self-esteem is closely tied to their weight and shape, they experience their weight or shape as larger (often as "fat") than it actually is, or they are unable to appreciate the serious nature of their degree of malnutrition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Children and adolescents with anorexia nervosa may either solely restrict their caloric intake, or they may, in addition, experience episodes of binge eating and purging, the latter most commonly through self-induced vomiting. There are also reports of anorexia nervosa occurring in children prior to puberty (Lask & Bryant-Waugh, 1997). The prevalence of anorexia nervosa has been reported to be .48% or about 1 in 200 girls (ages 15-19 years), making this illness "the third most common chronic condition" in this age group (Fisher et al., 1995). Although the majority of sufferers of eating disorders are females, some reports indicate that a significantly higher percentage of children (as opposed to adults) with anorexia nervosa are boys (Fosson, Knibbs, Bryant-Waugh, & Lask, 1987). " She notices that the last reference is not in the list of references at the end of the paper. Later in the paper, she reads the following passage: "Children and adolescents with eating disorders, while often highly achievement oriented and perfectionistic in school, may exhibit the usual range of cognitive strengths and weaknesses and may have learning disabilities. The effects of starvation may be severe (Garner, 1997) and accentuate the stresses these students experience in the school setting. Many of the cognitive and affective (mood) characteristics listed below are due to the effects of malnutrition (Neuman & Halvorson, 1983)." The references in this passage are listed at the end of the paper. But the two passages differ in style from the rest of the paper; they have a more scholarly tone. Using your institution's Web research databases, do you find any evidence these passages are not original? Post your findings to the Detecting Plagiarism Conferences section of your Study Group.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. (1995). Cryoauthorship:  The Mummy Walks! Pre/Text 16. 1-2, 38-53.