Essay Cheat

The pace of research has accelerated, fuelled by the ready availability of material in electronic format. But there is a downside, with a minority of students and researchers passing off others' work as their own. Plagiarism ranges from cheating at undergraduate level to high-profile fraud in the research world. Publishers are taking steps to address the problem, with plagiarism detection software complementing the traditional editorial process, and are keen to cite this as part of the added value they offer. But is plagiarism a real problem? Ian Russell, CEO of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), says: "We believe that plagiarism is, thankfully, very rare in scholarly publishing, but even a small amount can affect trust in the system, so publishers need to take whatever steps they can to make sure that what they publish is original and high quality. "Academic authors are overwhelmingly honest and the vast majority behave with the utmost propriety but there have been a few high-profile cases of plagiarism, and publishers have a duty to authors and readers to remain vigilant." The need to address plagiarism has driven massive growth at iParadigm, whose Turnitin and iAuthenticate products dominate the plagiarism detection market. Both Elsevier and CrossRef have thrown their weight behind iParadigm in recent months with announcements of link-ups. CrossRef describes itself as a non-profit membership association founded and directed by publishers to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content by promoting the co-operative development and application of a sustainable infrastructure. It has signed with iParadigm to create the CrossCheck service, which compares new manuscripts against already published materials in its database. by popular demand. CrossRef executive director Ed Pentz says: "Our members were expressing a need for such a service and since it's something that is best achieved by collective action and collaboration among publishers, the board identified it as a strategic priority." CrossCheck has since picked up an ALPSP award for its contribution to the publishing process. It is the first plagiarism checking system with access to full-text scholarly content, and, unlike freely available services, is geared to checking full-text documents and can be integrated into publishers' editorial workflow in an automated way. "CrossCheck addresses these issues," says Russell. "With CrossCheck there is a comprehensive database of full-text scholarly content to check against; it can be integrated into editorial workflows; and full-text documents are checked against full-text documents." At the launch of the service in the summer, Pentz appealed for publishers to join the initiative. He says he is pleased with level of take-up since. "The service depends on the participation of publishers, who have work to do to integrate the checking into the editorial process, but we've worked closely with the main manuscript tracking software providers to enable as much automation as possible," he says. "iParadigm produced an API to enable this integration." Plagiarism detection software was widely used at first to detect plagiarism in student work and it is in this arena that some of the early issues have been thrashed out. For example, universities that installed Turnitin to compare student work against previous submissions and web pages have found themselves accused of failing to teach their students citing and research methodology, simply policing transgressors instead. And some academics had concerns that the software didn't work that well and only spotted word for word copying. Students also complained about plagiarism detection systems, saying that the collation of their work for use within the products violated their copyright. In the US, students took iParadigm to court on the issue but Judge Claude Hilton ruled that the use of student papers was a "transformative use" that did not infringe on student copyrights, and even went so far as to say that the service protects student papers from future exploitation. iParadigm representative Katie Povejsil describes the steps that have been taken to address copyright concerns: "Over a number of years, we have offered many options to schools regarding how they deploy Turnitin in accordance with each institution's policies. "We have historically provided the option at the institutional level to exclude papers from our database, by having a private node that keeps all of that institution's papers separated from our database. We have also always allowed instructors to choose to have their students' papers excluded from the database. "We have recently expanded these options so the institution can permit instructors to allow students to also make their own choices regarding the submission of their papers to our database." Another major issue is that some plagiarists do not consider that what they are doing is plagiarisation. Here, education in information literacy by information professionals has an important part to play. Povejsil says: "Students are particularly vulnerable to unintended plagiarism because they really do not understand what plagiarism is, even when they have been repeatedly told about it. They are just learning to write and express complex ideas, and they often use source material inappropriately. "We encourage schools to use Turnitin as an instructional tool, to help students get it right rather than playing gotcha with students. When students see their originality reports, they have an 'aha!' moment and realise what they have done." The increasing sophistication of plagiarism detection systems has largely addressed concerns about overreliance on systems that do not detect paraphrases of the original as plagiarism. Povejsil says: "The sophisticated, proprietary, pattern-matching algorithms used by the Turnitin service can identify paraphrased work as well as word-for-word copying. While the degree of matching certainly depends on the skill of the paraphraser, the type of paraphrasing done by many students can often be matched by the Turnitin algorithms." But the identification of plagiarism requires human judgement to evaluate the situation and the context of each case. No system can ever detect an intention to plagiarise and a holistic approach to the issue should be taken. Will Murray, service director of JISC Plagiarism Advice Service (JISC-PAS), says: "If there is matching text between two documents, then a person has to review the report from the plagiarism detection system and understand what is going on. As part of the editorial process any honest mistakes or misunderstandings can be corrected and the whole process can be a learning experience." JISC set up JISC-PAS to advise on the best approaches to plagiarism within the higher education community but Murray says the issue is not confined to students and can be cultural. "There is an important educational aspect to the issue of plagiarism," he explains. "I recall an anecdote about some physicists, who were not native English speakers, putting together a paper for an English language academic journal. They had copied the introduction from another article verbatim because it fitted their paper very well and was well written: they couldn't have done it better themselves and so they copied it. "In their culture this was perfectly acceptable and they simply hadn't realised they were doing anything wrong. Of course, publishers should, and most do, provide clear guidelines and instructions to their authors about this issue." JISC-PAS is developing a wiki-based plagiarism site that will draw together resources from the sector. Murray says: "The work we do with student plagiarism both undergraduate and postgraduate has clear benefits and overlaps with both the publishing and research sectors. We want to help institutions adapt to the new information age." The widespread adoption of plagiarism detection services 95% of UK universities use them is acting as a real deterrent, according to Murray. A number of free internet-based plagiarism checkers are available but Murray does not believe they represent a real challenge to Turnitin's entrenchment in the academic community. "The free services are a great resource and are also helping this process," Murray says. "However, they borrow search-time from the leading search engines like Google and are therefore at the mercy of these services and the content that they have crawled. Paid-for services, like Turnitin, have huge repositories of past papers and published articles not available to the free services. "Google is a fantastic tool, but its page-rank is based on popularity and not necessarily authority. It is certainly the case that information literacy and the role of the librarian is fundamental in providing students with the skills they need to work with information." Murray rejects concerns that Turnitin compromises copyright while seeking to prevent plagiarism. "Turnitin doesn't provide any mechanism by which stored papers can be searched or accessed without plagiarism having been detected," he explains. "If I submit a paper to Turnitin and it gets a match with a paper in the student papers database I will see the bits of the paper (which I submitted) highlighted. I cannot see the original work without the permission of the institution that submitted it." While there is a place for software and systems to detect the reuse of copy, information literacy lies at the heart of the plagiarism issue. Info pros have a big part to play in making sure that researchers understand how best to use information to further their research. LOAD-DATE: November 3, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper