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VERIFYING PLAGIARISM [A WEBPAGE FOR PROFESSORS]
[ROUGH DRAFT]
After detecting a possible case of plagiarism, how can you verify that a student plagiarized? This guide reviews some library and other sources to consult for this purpose.
This guide does not discuss what cues can help you detect possible plagiarism. For example, one such cue is: does the student's bibliography contain anomalous or obscure sources? The "resources for detecting plagiarism" below for ideas about many other cues.
After you detect a case of possible plagiarism, what should you do? First, identify words, phrases, or sentence constructions that seem suspect. These can include vocabulary or complex sentence structure, or voice or sentences that are out of sync with the paper as a whole. Then, search these in the resources identified below.
You may want students to submit the electronic file of their written work, since the ability to copy and paste phrases from student work into a search engine may relieve the need to do a lot of typing when you are checking for plagiarism. Stating why you require an electronic file from the student might help deter plagiarism.
Resources:
Search suspect phrases from the student’s work in a popular search engine such as Google.
This webpage (Marywood University Library) illustrates how to do this in Google. Also, Google’s documentation spells out another way to do this: “If you're looking for an exact match, try a phrase search. When you enclose your search query in quotation marks, you'll only get results for the exact terms you entered in the order you entered them. For example, [ "Julia Fractals" ] rather than [ Julia Fractals ].”
The library has many databases that either contain, or can lead you to, the full text of documents. Here are examples of how to verify plagiarism by using these databases.
You may want to use TurnItIn software. [blurb about what it covers is here]. Our library databases will not pick up the paper mill items. According to one account, [Stacey: should we give link or just state this w/o a citation, latter if it is common knowledge], the paper mills have become increasingly sophisticated and papers are more current, more tailored, and harder to detect.
Please note that LTS neither endorses nor discourages use of Turn It In. It is entirely a faculty member’s discretion whether to use the software.
After consulting the resources mentioned above, here are additional resources to consult.
a. Co-citation analysis
b. Other web search engines
See the section “Web search engines to try” at this webpage for ideas about other search engines to try: “metasearch” engines that ranges over other search engines; Google Groups search engine; and “Internet Essay Exposer”. Also see the section at this website titled “Search the invisible web”, which searches the “deep web”.
c. Amazon.com
Amazon.com provides a capability to search for terms within books from which students may have plagiarized.
d. Books and Book Reviews
Students may plagiarize from print formats of books or from electronic books. Use ASA to identify books (both print and electronic) held by the library. Also see this listing of electronic books at the library. (This link is available from the library’s webpage.)
If you think a student plagiarized from a book, but are not sure from which, see these book review sources for help in locating candidate books that the plagiarist may have consulted.
Also, as this webpage mentions, "online bookstores sometimes offer extensive book reviews and are crawled by several of the most common search engines." Scroll down to see examples of "online bookstores".
The following webpages are well worth consulting for ideas about how to detect possible cases of plagiarism.