On Plagiarism

Compiled by

  Dr. Philip A. Pecorino 

 Professor,   Philosophy ,    Social Sciences Dept ,   Queensborough Community College,       CUNY

What Is Plagiarism? (History News Network site)     http://hnn.us/articles/514.html

**Best instructional Site**   http://leeds.bates.edu/cbb/

Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin (CBB) have jointly developed this site as part of an instruction program conceived to discourage student plagiarism. Intended as a clearinghouse for information on plagiarism, the site is especially concerned with news, developments, and resources that consider the issue in the context of undergraduate teaching and learning.  The site consists of two main sections: standalone resources and a collection of news items.

The Ultimate Plagiarism Guide: How to Detect and Prevent It

** Best MASTER SITE:**   http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism  by Sharon Stoerger MLS, MBA

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Contents of this Webpage

I.  Plagiarism Facilitation Sites

II. Detecting Plagiarism

III. Avoiding or Reducing or Mitigating Against Plagiarism

IV. Academic Integrity

I.  Plagiarism Facilitation Sites

Digital Plagiarism and other forms of Cheating : It Is Easier Than Ever

Some examples of sites with prepared or custom papers for sale or use:

Simple "Tips and Tricks" Web Sites  The Blur of Insanity Cheating Tricks    

In-Class Exercise Check out this page for detailed descriptions of how students cheat

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II. Detecting Plagiarism

Selected Anti-Plagiarism Sites

CopyCatch Gold
http://www.copycatch.freeserve.co.uk/

EduTie.com
http://www.edutie.com/

EVE (Essay Verification Engine)
A downloadable application that performs complex searches against text, Microsoft Corp. Word files, and Corel Corp. WordPerfect files.
www.canexus.com

EVE2: Essay Verification Engine
http://www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml

Findsame

http://www.findsame.com    scans the Web for matching sentences or whole documents, instead of just keywords

Glatt Plagiarism Program
http://www.plagiarism.com

HowOriginal.com
A free service that checks a 1K chunk of text against Internet resources for plagiarism. Written samples are not added to their database.
www.howoriginal.com

Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC): Electronic Plagiarism Detection
http://online.northumbria.ac.uk/faculties/art/information_studies/Imri/Jiscpas/site/detect.asp

JPlag
http://www.jplag.de/

Library Electronic Databases
http://gateway.library.uiuc.edu/ersearch/

Moss
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html

Plagiarism.org
Self-described “online resource for educators concerned with the growing problem of Internet plagiarism.”
www.plagiarism.org and
www.turnitin.com

Plagiarized.com
“The Instructors Guide to Internet Plagiarism.”
www.plagiarized.com

PaperBin.com
A commercial service that checks student papers against its paper database. It bills itself as a plagiarism-prevention service.
www.paperbin.com

PlagiServe
A free site that checks against paper mill sites to find copied text.
www.plagiserve.com  

The Plagiarism Resource Site
http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/

 WordCHECK
http://www.wordchecksystems.com/

 

http://www.turnitin.com/

This service takes a digital fingerprint of the student's paper, then scans the Internet and the group's own database looking for matches, highlighting passages that match and providing links to the online source. Turnitin.com, a popular service, offers a simple method that allows both teachers and students to submit papers to electronic scrutiny. The service compares the paper against millions of Web sites, a database of previous submissions and papers offered by the so-called term-paper mills. Turnitin.com then sends a report with the results to the teacher. High schools using this service pay around $1,000 a year for an unlimited number of submissions. Colleges pay roughly $2,000. Dr. John M. Barrie, a founder of Turnitin.com, estimated that of all the work submitted to the site, nearly one-third is copied in whole or in part from another source.

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Thoughts well worth considering from George Otte, CUNY

Along with all new technologies there are positive and negative effects. The world wide web is not an exception to this. Does the Internet make it easier for students to plagiarize? Unfortunately, the answer is yes....

This is a point well-taken. What too few students -- and, frankly, too few faculty -- realize is how much easier the Internet makes the catching of e-plagiarists. Anything found on the Web can be found again, and very easily. The key is effective use of search engines. For those who want a basic introduction, searchengines.com -- http://www.searchengines.com/ -- offers a good introduction to the ever-proliferating variety. Especially useful means of tracking down plagiarized material are full-text search engines like AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/) and ones with obsessively refreshed and updated indexes like that of TrueSearch.com (http://www.truesearch.com/). The trick, especially for full-text searches, is to drop in a string of words -- less than a sentence but enough to be a distinctive (maybe even unique) combination.

Such tracking down is literally push-button easy, and getting easier all the time. The latest wave (not all that recent, really) is of so-called metasearch engines (search engines that search the search engines and return results for, say, ten or more of them. Some of the better-known ones are Dogpile, Mamma, and MetaCrawler.

Given the ease of tracking down information, the real issue for students and faculty alike ought to be what to do with it. Information should be used, not cut-and-pasted. Assignments should ask students to do more than just report information, and students should understand that research usually has a purpose or point beyond re-presenting what someone else has presented. It's these things we ought to focus on, especially since tracking down stuff (whether as sources or as evidence of plagiarism) has become so easy.

Software to detect plagiarism:

  1. CopyCatch: www.copycatch.freeserve.co.uk

  2. Plagiarism.com: www.plagiarism.com

  3. WCopyfind

This prProgram examines a collection of document files. It extracts the text portions of those documents and looks through them for matching words in phrases of a specified minimum length. When it finds two files that share enough words in those phrases, WCopyfind generates html report files. These reports contain the document text with the matching phrases underlined.

What WCopyfind can do: It can find documents that share large amounts of text. This result may indicate that one file is a copy or partial copy of the other, or that they are both copies or partial copies of a third document.

What WCopyfind cannot do: It cannot search for text that was copied from any external source, unless you include that external source in the documents you give to WCopyfind. It works on only purely local data—it cannot search the web or internet to find matching documents. If you suspect that a particular outside source has been copied, you must create a local document containing that outside material and include this document in the collection of documents that you give to WCopyfind.

Download WCopyfind Program

Read WCopyfind Instructions

GNU General Public License information – Wcopyfind is free software, but is covered by a license that places certain restrictions on its use, modification, and distribution.

For Experts Only:  Download WCopyfind Source (a Microsoft Visual C++ Workspace)

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Comparison of Plagiarism Detection Tools

Commercial Anti-Plagiarism Services: Do they Work?
Some Examples:
1.  Glatt Services
http://www.plagiarism.org/ now offering Turnitin http://www.turnitin.com/
2. FindSame
http://www.findsame.com/
3. Integriguard
http://www.integriguard.com
4. How Original? (from Integriguard)
http://www.howoriginal.com

Search Engines & Plagiarism Some Links:
1. AltaVista http://www.altavista.com
2. Google http://www.google.com
3. Fast Search http://www.bos2.alltheweb.com/
4. Metacrawler http://www.metacrawler.com

http://www.alltheweb.com

http://www.copernic.com/download/

http://www.searchengines.com/

http://www.truesearch.com/

http://www.dogpile.com

http://www.mamma.com

http://www.ablesoft-inc.com

http://www.softwaresecure.com

http://www.hyperfolio.com

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III. Avoiding or Reducing or Mitigating Against Plagiarism

Tips for Recognizing and Avoiding The Problem

Some Examples:

1. Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers http://www.vanguard.edu/rharris/antiplag.htm

2. Plagiarized.com http://www.plagiarized.com/

3. Electronic Plagiarism Seminar http://www.lemoyne.edu/library/plagiarism.htm

4. Cut-And-Paste Plagiarism http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~janicke/plagiary.htm

5. How to Detect and Combat Plagiarism http://library.shastacollege.edu/detectcombat.html

6. Strategies for avoidance from BMCC CUNY Site http://lib1.bmcc.cuny.edu/lib/facres/plagiarism.html

7.Plagiarism handout is designed to help writers develop strategies for knowing how to avoid accidental plagiarism.  http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/research/r_plagiar.html

8.The New Plagiarism:Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age by Jamie McKenzie  http://www.fno.org/may98/cov98may.html

9. Student Plagiarism in an Online World
http://www.asee.org/prism/december/html/student_plagiarism_in_an_onlin.htm

10. Copy these Strategies to Avoid Plagiarism by Students http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/editorial/97/09/29/galles.0-0.html

11. How Teachers Can Reduce Cheating's Lure
http://csmonitor.com/durable/1997/10/27/feat/learning.3.html

12.  Plagiarism: What It Is and How To Avoid It (MIT site) http://libraries.mit.edu/guides/courses/fall2001/21f.222/plagiarism.html

Anti-Plagiarism Resources: Combating Cheating and Plagiarism

Anti-Plagiarism Strategies This article discusses strategies for preventing student plagiarism and detecting its occurrence. www.virtualsalt.com/antiplag.htm

Plagiarism.org  Online service for preventing plagiarism, deterring scholarly dishonesty and cheating, and raising academic ethics. Detects plagiarized papers by comparing  www.plagiarism.org

PlagiariPlagiarism in Colleges in USA: http://www.rbs2.com/plag.htm

SCenteSample Honor Codes   http://www.academicintegrity.org/samp_honor_codes.asp 

Plagiari Plagiarism Policy at the University of Michigan English Department: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/undergraduate/plag.htm

The Plagiarism Handbook: www.antiplagiarism.com 

What is Plagiarism?
Guidelines from the Georgetown University Honor Council.
www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagiarism.html

Avoiding Plagiarism
Guidelines from the Office of Student Judicial Affairs at the University of California, Davis.
sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm  

Carnegie Mellon University- Discussion and Guide 

http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/acad_integ/acad_int.html 

Plagiarism and the Web (Western Illinois U site)

http://www.wiu.edu/users/mfbhl/wiu/plagiarism.htm

Evaluating What You Find in the Library and on the Internet (MIT again)

http://libraries.mit.edu/guides/courses/fall2001/21f.222/evaluate.html

 

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Plagiarism in Philosophy

George MacDonald Ross "Plagiarism in Philosophy: Prevention Better than Cure"  http://www.prs-ltsn.ac.uk/plagiarism/gmrphilplag.html    January 2004

George MacDonald Ross "Plagiarism Really Is a Crime: A Counterblast against Anarchists, Postmodernists (and others)" http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/GMR/public/CounterblastRevised.doc , 2004  A critique of those who refuse to take plagiarism seriously
by    George MacDonald Ross, Director
Philosophical and Religious Studies Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy
School of Philosophy, University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT UK
+44 (0)113-343-3283
g.m.ross@leeds.ac.uk
http://www.prs-ltsn.ac.uk

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IV. Academic Integrity

On Academic Integrity: Materials from the Center for Ethics at USD

http://ethics.acusd.edu/Resources/academicIntegrity/  

Academic Integrity and the World Wide Web

http://ethics.acusd.edu/presentations/cai2000/index_files/frame.htm 

http://ethics.acusd.edu/presentations/CAI99/index_files/frame.htm  

Fundamental Values

http://www.academicintegrity.org/fundamental.asp

http://www.academicintegrity.org/pdf/FVProject.pdf 

CEPE2000  Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry  Dartmouth College   July 14-16, 2000

Lawrence M. Hinman   University of San Diego  "Academic Integrity and the World Wide Web"

Bernard Gert  Dartmouth College  "Cheating"  

10th Annual Meeting  Center for Academic Integrity  Colorado Springs, Colorado  November, 2000

Keynote Address  Gen. Malham M. Wakin, USAF, Ret.

Research Update   Don McCabe &  Susan Stearns

Ethical Development  Elizabeth Kiss &  Gary Pavela

A Student Fishbowl: A Conversation on Ethical Development Elizabeth Kiss et al.

11th Annual Meeting  Center for Academic Integrity,  2001

Keynote Address   Elizabeth Kiss

Keynote Address    Don McCabe An Overview of Research on Academic Integrity

On-line Academic Integrity Codes

On-line Honor Codes

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plagiarism  anti-plagiarism  strategies against  plagiarism

plagiarism  anti-plagiarism  strategies against  plagiarism