Inside Iowa State: Iowa State University

INSIDE IOWA STATE
February 15, 2002

Wrestling with electronic plagiarism

by Debra Gibson
Out of cite, out of mind. And out of luck, if students get caught trying to pass off plagiarized papers as their own work.

The university's Office of Judicial Affairs reviewed more than 60 cases of suspected plagiarism during the 2000-01 academic year, and another 35 cases were heard fall semester.

To help professors combat plagiarism, the Center for Teaching Excellence sponsored a Feb. 7 workshop presented by Rebecca Jackson, head of the social sciences and humanities department at the Parks Library, and Dru Frykberg, librarian at the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication. They looked specifically at plagiarized, Internet-based information in papers and reports.

"Most students don't understand what plagiarism is," Jackson said in an interview prior to the workshop. "They assume that if it's on the Web, then it's free and it's theirs."

Jackson offered tips on how professors might thwart plagiarism in the classroom:

Discuss plagiarism with students at the beginning of the term. Share personal awareness or previous experiences with online "paper mills" that give away or sell entire term papers. Show them examples of papers obtained from these sources, or from plagiarizing others' works. Teach students the appropriate way to cite sources.

"Because of plagiarism, some professors have forbidden their students from using Internet sources in their research, and that's unfortunate," Jackson said. "The library has a lot of expensive abstracts and indexes available through the Internet, many of which link to useful, full-text journal articles."
Organize the assignment as a process. Establish deadlines for thesis statements, outlines, rough drafts, etc., which require the professor's continuing oversight of the project.
Accept only current references, and from a variety of sources (e.g. Internet articles, books, journal articles).
Be creative. Change assignments each semester, so previously written papers aren't already available.
Assign unusual formats for projects, such as newsletters or exhibits.

According to Jackson, here are clues that a submitted paper may be plagiarized:

The writing style is not consistent with a student's typical work.
A student requests a last-minute change of topic.
Citations in a paper originate with sources not available at the Parks Library, or no citations are listed.
Citations originate from several years past. Web sites that churn out entire term papers for free or for purchase often distribute reports that are several years old, with equally outdated citations.
When asked, a student isn't able to describe the research process or provide a verbal summary of the paper's content.

Proving plagiarism can be tricky. Several fee-based Internet tracking services, such as Turnitin.com and the GLATT Plagiarism Screening Program, compare submitted papers to Web-based sources and highlight copied passages. Jackson, though, discourages the use of these services.

"Those services can't get to all sites on the Web," she explained, "in particular, those sites that require fees to access information. That eliminates a lot of online journals and other sources with full-text formats, an area that is often called 'the invisible Web.'"

Instead, Jackson recommends faculty members independently use Internet search engines and article databases to track unique phrases or suspect passages in a submitted paper. URLs listed as sources should be reviewed carefully and professors should check that the Parks Library does indeed offer the sources cited by students. University procedures are in place for reporting suspected academic dishonesty, outlined in the Student Information Handbook.

For additional information on eliminating plagiarism in the classroom, check out the Instructional Commons, part of the Parks Library Web site, at http://www.lib.iastate.edu/commons/resources/index.html, under "Ethical/Legal Issues in Using Information."