Searching for Plagiarism – Part 2 of 2
Posted on June 18, 2008 by admin
Filed Under Research, Students, Teaching, Writing Process
Cartoon Via bLaugh
Professors and administration have both told students not to plagiarize, but papers still get handed in with parts that seem suspicious of plagiarism. This can take on various forms: submitting original work from a previous class without the professor’s approval, submitting other people’s work in part or full, using other people’s research data or findings or simply not citing resources properly. If you suspect an assignment may be plagiarized, there are a few different tools you can use to investigate. When conducting your search, you should let two things lead you:
1. The suspected sections of text in the paper.
2. The general topic of the paper.
This allows you to find directly copied sections of text as well as areas which have been paraphrased. The most valuable tool for detecting plagiarism is a search engine, such as Google.
Example of how to search for plagiarism
If you come across a suspicious sentence (shown below) in an essay on African American Women and Music and would like to check it for plagiarism, follow the steps below.
“Like blues, jazz began to shape during slavery, and in the years after the civil war. The end of slavery meant the end of an isolation period that prevented blacks from sharing ideas and art forms such as music.”
1. Enter some of the suspected text in quotations as well as the topic of the essay. For the example above, entering the following would be affective:
“African American Women and Music “Like blues, jazz began to shape during slavery, and in the years after the civil war”
2. The search engine will give you a list of matches corresponding to the sentence you have entered. You can then look though the links to see if there are any that are similar. You will have to use your best judgment to determine if a sentence or idea has been lifted without citation or if it is merely a similar sentence.
Places to Search
The Web
The easiest and most effective way to search for plagiarism is to enter your query into a search engine. Since that is where most articles would have been found in the first place, they are most likely going to come up in your search as well. Although there are many search engines and resources you can use, each one will yield fairly similar results. Below is a list of some of the most popular:
Books or Journal Articles:
Other Plagiarism Detection Tools
- TurnItIn. A online tool that allows you to upload your student’s work and check it against other student’s work and the web (http://turnitin.com/static/plagiarism.html).
- The Plagiarism Resource Site. A tool created by the University of Virgina to compare many of your student’s work (http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/).
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