October 22, 1998-Vol30n9: Electronic Highways

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 09 THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1998

Promoting Academic Honesty: Anti-Plagiarism on the Web

Are you searching for repositories of downloadable papers to which your name may be affixed for academic credit? Did you realize how simple it is to copy and paste information from the Web into your research papers without proper citation? Have you realized that possible consequences from such activity may include academic failure and expulsion from this or any other university? Many academics have faulted the Internet for a tendency toward increased campus plagiarism because of the ready availability of information and the ease of downloading and duplicating such material. Fortunately, there are numerous sites on the Web dedicated to combating plagiarism in all its forms.

The University's Student Conduct Rules (<http://www.ub-judiciary.buffalo.edu/art5a.html>, under the heading "Academic Dishonesty") clearly mentions plagiarism as a form of academic dishonesty. Plagiarism is defined as taking the writing or the ideas of another as one's own without proper credit. Two excellent essays that discuss basic aspects of plagiarism are "Plagiary and the Art of Skillful Citation" by John Rodgers <http://condor.bcm.tmc.edu/Micro-Immuno/courses/igr/homeric.html> and "Plagiarism" by Brad Fiero <http://west.cscwc.pima.edu/~bfiero/plagrsm.htm>.

Unconscious plagiarism results from careless notetaking, overusing quoted passages, or keeping catchy phrases or ideas in one's mind and replicating them without recalling that they are actually someone else's. It is beneficial to examine your own writing to ensure that it is truly original in thought and word. Glatt Plagiarism Services has devised a simple test to detect whether you may have inadvertently plagiarized. This test <http://www.plagiarism.com/self.detect.htm> is based on memory retention of text and is free of charge.

Instructors who suspect plagiarism in their classes may utilize the Internet as a detection agent. Some search engines, such as Alta Vista <http://www.altavista.digital.com> and Hotbot <http://www.hotbot.com>, may assist in searching uncharacteristic phrases that may appear in a text to determine whether the phrases may have been duplicated from elsewhere. Optionally, an instructor might employ an outside service, such as Plagiarism.org <http://www.plagiarism.org>, which checks submitted manuscripts against other documents on the Net to detect blatant instances of plagiarized text.

Unfortunately, there is no single way to prevent your own material on the Web from being plagiarized by others, but there are some tools to assist you in protecting the rights to your work. One possible solution is to use Hyperstamps <http://www.hyperstamps.com/>. These are downloadable labels you can affix to Web documents specifying the limits of rights allowed to others. They may range from free use to full international copyright. The Hyperstamps may be freely used. Chargeable services include serialized registration of documents or detection of possible plagiarism and/or copyright infringement.

The best prevention of plagiarism is education. Learn tips for your own writing such as in Sharon Williams' "Avoiding Plagiarism" <http://www.hamilton.edu/academic/Resource/WC/AvoidingPlagiarism.html>. The University Libraries offers links to sites on proper citation of electronic resources (<http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/help/>, under the heading "Guides to Using the Internet"). And for instructors, it may help to know locations of commercial paper mills and to incorporate anti-plagiarism strategies into your class planning. Both are offered by Bruce Leland at his "Plagiarism and the Web" site <http://http.ecn.bgu.edu/users/mfbhl/wiu/plagiarism.htm>.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Deborah Husted Koshinsky and Rick McRae, University Libraries