Plagiarism Information for Faculty
Information for your students about plagiarism.
Information for you, the educator about how to detect it.
For your students:
Have your students take this
Plagiarism Tutorial and Quiz!
(courtesy of San Jose State University Library)
Using any work by someone else without giving proper credit is plagiarism. Any time you use any information from any source, you must cite it.
Pla.gia.rize play-ja-rise v.
- to steal and pass off (the ideas, work, words, graphics, computer programs, writing, charts, pictures, graphs, diagrams, data, websites, communication or recording media, phrases, innovative terminology, formatting, or any other representation of another) as one's own.
- use (another's production) without crediting the source.
- to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.
"Plagiarism: What It is and How to Recognize and Avoid It" from Indiana University is found at http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml. This web-site presents clear explanations and examples of how a passage from a text can be plagiarized or cited correctly. It also has "Strategies for Avoiding Plagiarism" and "Terms You Need to Know" (like what is and isn't 'common knowledge').
A few of the other sites that offer students advice and instruction on avoiding plagiarism are:
For you the educator:
"Term Paper Mills or How The Internet Re-Invented Plagiarism"
"In June of 1996, a message was e-mailed to fraternity and sorority chapters across the country advertising a new electronic repository for down-loadable college papers. The site was called 'schoolsucks.com', and featured the slogan 'Download Your Workload.' The current version of the site includes a banner announcing 'SchoolSucks is the largest collection of free but awful homework. SchoolSucks is 100% against plagiarism."
[from http://www.wiu.edu/users/mfbhl/wiu/plagiarism.htm.
This site (the one from wiu) offers a list of suggestions for professors regarding assignments that will help deter Internet plagiarism, and a list of links to pursue that topic further.
These sites include plagiarized-papers-for-a-fee, free papers, and custom-written papers for a fee. For a list of approximately 150 of these sites, see:
http://www.coastal.edu/library/presentations/mills2.html
To read the text of Coastal Carolina University's Kimbel Library's presentation on plagiarism, see:
http://www.coastal.edu/library/presentations/papermil.html
Detecting Internet Plagiarism
As the Internet has spawned ways for students to use plagiarized materials, so has it spawned web-sites for professors to detect plagiarism. Some offer suggestions on using popular search engines as detection devices, while others are tools that will do the detecting for you. Some are free, others are not.
- Educause Resources related to Plagiarism http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/Plagiarism
- "Plagiarism and Anti-Plagiarism" by Heyward Ehrlich http://www.andromeda.rutger.edu/~erlich/plagiarism598.html, May 20, 1998; minor additions/corrections Sept 26, 1998; May 17, 1999; Jan. Mar. 20, 2000.
- This web-site includes a discussion of the problem, assignment suggestions to deter plagiarism, web-sites for detection, some relevant news articles, and a section on MLA web citation style.
- The "Sample Essays" at the "Training Centre" on Plagiarized.com http://www.plagiarized.com/workshop.html
- Calls itself, "The Instructor's Guide To Internet Plagiarism" and are, ". . . . designed to provide instructors with a means of practising their detection skills." Also helpful are his collection of "Dead Giveaways", and list of titles of papers available to be plagiarized.
- Tip from the October 2000 issue of School Library Journal:
- Look for a fairly unique phrase in the student's paper, and do a search for the phrase on GOOGLE.com. If the document is in plain view on a site, this will often find it.
- Glatt Plagiarism Services has three software programs available to detect and deter plagiarism:
http://www.plagiarism.com.
- Glatt Plagiarism Teaching Program, Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program, Glatt Plagiarism Self-Detection Program. This program blanks out every fifth word. You give the paper back to the student. If they can't fill in the blanks, or if they do and the "fit" score is low, they didn't write it.
- "Cut-and-Paste Plagiarism: Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism" is the title of a site by Lisa Hinchliffe. http://www.uregina.ca/tdc/CutPastePlagiarism.htm
- Besides tips on each of those subjects, she has a good bibliography on the subject of plagiarism.
- From a company named Digital Integrity comes the web site at http://www.findsame.com>.
- Their motto is "Find content, not keywords." To quote part of the introduction, "You submit an entire document, and we return a list of Web pages that contain any fragment of that document longer than about one line of text." You can run a demo for free, then contact them for more information and prices.
- A scholarly study concerning the legal aspects of plagiarism is available in Ronald B. Standler's work at http://www.rbs2.com/plag.htm.
- In "Plagiarism at Colleges in the USA," Standler covers the law of plagiarism, cases involving plagiarism at colleges, suggested plagiarism policies for colleges and universities, the concept of "Self-plagiarism," and links to other web pages with relevant information.
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