Catching Plagiarism
Catching Plagiarism. Teachers and editors have a tough job detecting plagiarism, but there are several strategies that can be used to detect dishonesty. After interviewing Frank Mullen, a journalism professor and employee of the Reno Gazette-Journal, and Sandy Week, a computer professor, we found that their first line of defense against plagiarism is to pay attention. They look for paragraphs that don’t fit with the rest of the paper, or homework that matches another student’s work. Once suspicious, they use websites, such as www.turnitin.com and www.plagiarism.org to confirm that the paper was plagiarized. These websites have extensive databases to compare papers to and they also use "automated web crawlers," which search the web for matching verbiage. Some of the websites require a paid membership and others require you to purchase software, but they can be well worth the price for a suspicious professor or editor.
The Costal Carolina University’s website (www.coastal.edu/library/plagiarz.htm) also provides some things to look out for in order to detect plagiarism, such as:
- "Writing style, language, vocabulary, tone, grammar, etc. is above or below what the student usually produces. It doesn’t sound like the student."
- "Strange or poor layout. Papers that have been downloaded and re-printed often have page numbers, headings, or spacing that just don’t look right."
- "References to graphs, charts, or accompanying material that isn’t there."
From a professional perspective, Frank Mullen says, "Plagiarism is a mortal sin." He notes three cases during his 15 years at the paper where reporters were caught plagiarizing. In all three cases, the reporters were fired.
In conclusion, plagiarizers are usually careless and lazy, making their stolen work often easy for teachers or editors to recognize; there are also many websites and software available to verify suspicions. And once a plagiarizer is caught, there are usually harsh consequences.
Source: jour.unr.edu
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