Article for Teachers

Cut and Paste Plagiarism

Preventing, Detecting and Tracking Online Plagiarism

Lisa Hinchliffe - May 1998

What is Plagiarism?

Plagiarism is a difficult concept to define. It includes a range of actions from failure to use proper citation to wholesale cheating. A student who plagiarizes may do so unintentionally or with planful deliberation.

Types of plagiarism:

• Buying a paper for a research service or term paper mill.
• Turning in another student's work without that student?s knowledge.
• Turning in a paper a peer has written for the student.
• Copying a paper from a source text without proper acknowledgment.
• Copying materials from a source text, supplying proper documentation, but leaving out quotation marks.
• Paraphrasing materials from a source text without appropriate documentation.

The Internet has made simple an additional type of plagiarism:

Turning in a paper from a "free term paper" website.

Emphasize the processes involved in doing research and writing papers. Ways to do so include requiring topic proposals, idea outlines, multiple drafts, interim working bibliographies and photocopies of sources.
• Require students to engage and apply ideas, not just describe them.
• Require students to reflect personally on the topic or the processes of research and writing, either in the paper or as an additional writing assignment.
• Discuss plagiarism with students, both what it is and your policies about it.

How Can I Detect Plagiarism?

• Check for unusual formatting or formatting that does not match what you require. In particular, check for website printout page numbers or dates, grayed out letters and unusual use of upper/lower case and capitalization.
Notice any jargon or advanced vocabulary or sentence structure.
• Read quotations carefully. Do they sound like a quote from an interview? Are there quotes without bibliographic entries?
• Reference the original assignment. Are any portions of the assignment completely left out? Do any portions read like they were "added on" to the paper? Is it the correct type of paper, e.g. descriptive, position, first person, narrative?
• Review the bibliography. Is the correct citation style used? Is the citation style used consistently? Does it match the sources referenced in the paper? Are there many items that the academic institution's library does not have?

• Check for original author identification clues. Follow up with a web search for a personal homepage and the website(s) of the organization(s) with which the author is affiliated.
• heck for original source identification clues. Follow up with a web search for the original source.
• Identify unusual keywords or unique phrases and search them in one of the large search engines such as HotBot or Infoseek.
• Look at original text of sources listed in the bibliography.
• Browse the websites listed in Yahoo! - Business and Economy:Companies:Education:Term Paper Assistance
• Ask a reference librarian for assistance

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