Okay...plagiarism...?

Question

There's a fine line between plagiarism and just using them as sources but does anyone know who plagiarism is detected? Does anyone know how the programme 'turnitin' works?

how plagiarism is detected... is what i was meant to type...lol!

Answer 1

I have frequently identified plagiarists who post responses to questions here that they know full well they didn't write but failed to attribute. Each time I do, I post a response identifying the actual source of the plagiarized material and reminding the responder that it is unethical, dishonest and illegal to use others' material without attribution.

A lot of plagiarized material is actually fairly easy to detect, thanks to the wealth of information on the Internet, including texts of books, and the power of Internet search engines such as Google at one's disposal to sort through the voluminous material.

My technique is to select a few sentences (not just a couple of words, but entire sentences), especially sentences containing unusual phrasing or complex structure, copy the sentence into the search bar, enclose it in quotes, hit enter and see what comes up. If the sentences show up verbatim at another website, it is highly likely the material has been plagiarized by the responder. Any professor can do the same thing.

Many people think just because the information appears on the Internet that is free to use without attribution. This is incorrect. It is as illegal to plagiarize material off the Internet as it is to copy it verbatim from a private document. And the fact that the source from which the material was purloined may have itself been plagiarized does not make it OK to plagiarize again.

Competent professors who take the time to develop a sense of their students' intellectual capabilities and writing skills will also not have much difficulty identifying and proving plagiarism using these same techniques.

For example, a student known to have a poor command of grammar in both writing and speaking is highly unlikely to be able to produce a paper of original material that contains few or no grammatical mistakes. Such a paper would be a dead giveaway that plagiarism is probably going on. What is harder to prove is whether the paper was written (but not plagiarized) by someone else for the student.

In any case, I absolutely agree with the responder who has said that there is a huge difference between plagiarism and "just using them as sources." And every student should understand that distinction. My advice is, if you're in doubt, attribute.

Answer 2

Plagiarism is detected in many ways. First of all, the faculty member may recognize the paper. I've heard of situations in which the student was actually dumb enough to turn in something written by the professor or hs/her advisor for a class. Secondly, the paper may be written in such a way that it is obviously not the work of the student. I once got a paper from a student whose English was very shaky. The paper was 15 pages long, had three items in the bibliography, and was written in three different styles - the first 5 pages were very witty, the next five used a lot of long words, etc. The three parts were connected by two short, ungrammatical sentences, like "Me go shop". I went to the library and looked at the three books in the library, and sure enough, she had lifted 5 pages verbatim from each and strung them together with those short sentences of her own.

More common these days is that you can Google a long passage of the paper and the original source will pop up. I know of faculty members who have been fired for plagiarism because the original author did that with his own article and the "copy" popped up.

Turnitin is a program which the university can purchase for use by the entire faculty, or just those who choose to use it. Basically, before the students' papers are graded, they are all run through the program. The program looks for matches in its database and also adds the new papers to its database. It will report back a percentage match and show the faculty member what it was matched to, so that the faculty member can decide if this was plagiarism. It obviously won't flag a paper which only shares with others a few words, but can say that 40% of the paper matched another in the database. Already in the database are most journal articles, well-known books, etc. It can thus also catch papers purchased off the internet and used before, etc.

Answer 3

We just got TurnItIn at my uni -UCL. I have used it for a couple of essays now and always get 6 or 7% plagarism...but thats because it picks up references etc. I think it just trawls the internet so if a whole book is online, and you quote from it, it will be highlightted. If another essay is online and has used the same references, they will be hilighted. Therefore as long as attribute any direct quotes to their author, you should be ok.

Answer 4

On the contrary, there is a BIG difference between referencing a source to support your work and trying to pass off somebody Else's work as your own. One is acceptable practice and the other is outright theft. If you do not understand this difference, you should contact any professor to explain it to you in detail.

If you do manage to "get away with it", what have you really gained? Grow up.

Answer 5

All of the above answers are correct, but I do know that many academics use special software to detect whether you have copied someone's work without referencing it properly. Don't take risks, write in your own words, and if you use quotes, put them in quotation marks and reference them, using techniques such as the harvard technique. DON'T CHEAT or you'll get caught!

Answer 6

Don't forget someone marks your work, they may recognise what you have written just off the top of their head or they may cross reference every essay against something else that will pull up items that have been plagiarised. You can reference your essay to material you have used in research. If you ANY doubt, you should check with your tutor BEFORE writing your essay.

Answer 7

Plagiarism detection softwares corellate your work to all of the existing work in univesities data bases and all of the search engines such as bing, google, yahoo searches etc.
If it detects some part being similiar - plagiarism percentage is shown (e.i. ratio copied stuff to the original)

Answer 8

That fine line is quoting the source when you use someone else's work, each place, each time, every time.