How to Detect Plagiarism
With the advent of Internet research, the profusion of information that may be cut and pasted with the click of a mouse has greatly increased the opportunity for students to plagiarize.
Researchers may plagiarize from the Internet in one of three ways:
1. In the use of material available free and openly on the World Wide Web.
2. In the use of material available to subscribers of pay services.
3. In the use of papers bought through the Web and e-mailed to the buyer.
For the first and most common form of plagiarism, you can easily use a search engine to find a source for text that has been plagiarized. Copy a series of distinctive words, or a seemingly unique phrase into the search box and look through the results.
It is more difficult to detect the use of material available only to subscribers of fee-based services. If you suspect plagiarism and do not get results using Google or another search engine, check with one of the librarians.
The third kind of plagiarism might appear to be hardest to detect, although one plagiarist was discovered when he failed to remove the phrases the vendor had used in the synopsis in his final copy. The best defense against this type of plagiarism is by doing enough writing in class so that disparities of tone, diction, and competence are evident in a plagiarized paper.
Technological Help in Detecting Plagiarism
MyDropBox.com "provides the world’s leading technology to detect and prevent cases of Internet plagiarism.
Turnitin.com is a subscription service featuring elaborate plagiarism detection techniques.
Teachers can detect plagiarism of computer source code using the free program JPLAG.
Essay Verification Engine (EVE2) is a popular, inexpensive plagiarism detection resource for teachers.
Just how easy is electronically-facilitated plagiarism?
Let’s do some plagiarizing. Pick a topic, an essay on Toni Morrison’s "Beloved", or the causes of the Civil War. Just by going to the Web and searching the topic, you can link to papers on these topics. Open one up and, ta-da! there’s your paper. Follow any of these links to see how easy it is for students who want to cheat to do so. These are all free providers.
