Library » Plagiarism Tips

Plagiarism Tips

Plagiarism is the deliberate or unintentional use of someone else’s work and not giving proper credit to its creator. It can be as flagrant as buying a research paper from a term paper mill, or as minor as not properly citing a source. The Internet may have made it easier for the “cut-and-paste generation” to copy and use plagiarized works, but it also allows instructors to to work backwards and track down instances of plagiary.

Why do students plagiarize?

As you know, students may plagiarize because they feel they are running out of time. They may also feel pressure to get an A. Some students simply have no compunction about cheating.

However, many students may not know that they are plagiarizing. They may think that everything on the Internet is in the public domain or that if they insert a few of their own words into a passage, it doesn’t have to be cited. They might think if they have the permission of the person creating the work, it’s okay to use it without attribution. Following the organization of a paper is okay, but a student might think it okay to borrow the exact text of the headings if they have their own content in the body of the work. See Why Students Plagiarize (University of Alberta Libraries).

What can you do to head it off?

Obviously, preventing plagiarism in the first place is the most desirable approach. Understanding the rules of plagiary yourself, and then educating your students in it, with examples, is a start. In particular, showing them how to properly cite paraphrases and summaries lets them see it is not only direct quotes that need citing. See Examples of Plagiarism.

Letting your students know that you are aware of paper mills and possess detection software, also lets students know you are savvy about plagiarism. Most important, perhaps, is getting your students to commit to academic honesty and integrity. See Fostering Academic Integrity at Rutgers.

Giving students research assignments that are clear, well-designed, and appropriate to their abilities will also head off plagiarism. Making sure the students know the steps of the research process and having them turn in portions of their work as they go along, forces students to do their own work. See Designing an Effective Library Assignment and Plagiarism: A Resource for Faculty. Also, if students know how to use style manuals for proper citation formats they will be less likely to be guilty of the unintentional forms of plagiarism.

So what are the rules?

Anything that is not common knowledge or the student’s own ideas (such as drawing conclusions from field research) needs to be acknowledged. It must be taken into consideration, however, that what is considered common knowledge in one field may not be common knowledge in another field.

The rules can be summarized as follows:

direct quotes are put in quotation marks and footnoted or put in parenthetical citations
summarizing or paraphrasing of text are not put in quotes, but must be attributed
if the excerpt is long, block indentation should be used

Students need good examples of what constitutes a paraphrase and a summary. Some style manuals (such as APA) do not make a distinction between summarizing and paraphrasing, but students should be made aware of the various ways to properly use the ideas, thoughts and opinions of their sources. One definition of the distinction can be found in the New St. Martin’s Handbook where it states: “Unlike a summary, a paraphrase always restates all the main points of a passage in the same order…” ¹

The format for referencing sources will vary, of course, with the citation style chosen. See How Not To Plagiarize and Examples of Materials which Have Been Appropriately Cited (from Northwestern University).

How can you tell if something is plagiarized?

As a faculty member you know your students best and you may simply get a sense there is something “fishy” about a paper while reading it. There are certain obvious signs that point to a plagiarized paper like mixed fonts or subheading styles, different citation formats, lack of footnotes altogether, or dead URLs. If the paper is written at a level well above (or below) what you know the student’s ability to be, or if the flow of the paper is abruptly interrupted by a change of style or tone, portions of the paper may be plagiarized. See Detecting Plagiarized Papers.

What tools are used to prove plagiarism?

There are different tools at your disposal to detect plagiarism depending on the kind of plagiarism you suspect. There are detection software services available that will compare the suspect paper to a database of thousands of papers from free and fee-based term paper mills and the internet. There is also software available that takes a sample of each student’s work and using an algorithm compares everything the student writes after that to the original writing. Glatt software removes every fifth word from the paper and the student must fill in the blanks.

The library’s own databases (such as Infotrac or Academic Search Premier) have the full text of thousands of articles that could be plagiarized. A keyword search of any group of words in the text of the paper should reveal this. The internet itself is often a source of plagiarized material and plagiarized text can be tracked down by using a search engine like Google and doing a similar type of keyword search. Putting an exact phrase in quotes in a search engine is usually the best way to locate portions of text stolen from the web. Also, do not overlook print sources. Books can be found the in the library’s catalog along with encyclopedias and other reference materials, and a subject search of these might lead you to a plagiarized source.

Links

Term Paper Mills — some free, some not

Detection Software

Eve2
Plagiarism Resouce Center — free software from the University of Virginia
Turnitin.com — very popular, free trial-subscription