plagiarism

The net is not only "the world's biggest photocopier", it is also a device for appropriating someone else's property of the mind. A few keystrokes and - hey presto - someone else's paper, essay, diagram, illustration or web page becomes your own. This page looks at plagiarism. It considers issues before highlighting the plagiarism industry - users, 'term paper mills' and plagiarism detection services.

It covers -

• introduction
• perspectives
• academic, government and industry studies
• plagiarism detection services
• prevalence of online plagiarism
• a problem outside the academy?
• ghostwriting

There are supplementary notes on essay/term paper mills and on ghosting, along with a note highlighting selected plagiarism incidents over the past three hundred years.

     introduction 

Plagiarism - claiming another's text or other creativity as your own - is the obverse of forgery (presenting your work as that of someone else). The scope for appropriation of online images and text is for many an inducement to plagiarism.

It is one reason why the 'attribution' provisions of the 2000 Moral Rights amendments to the Australian Copyright Act are of particular significance. 

It is also a business opportunity for entrepreneurs offering to sell an 'original' essay for next high school assignment or provide plagiarism detection services to educational institutions and publishers.

US satirist Tom Lehrer, in disclosing a secret of academic advancement, argued that plagiarism was as old as the hills: 

In one word he told me secret of success
Plagiarize!
Plagiarize, 
Let no one else's work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - 
Only be sure always to call it, please, 'research'

Figures who have been accused of plagiarism include Stephen Ambrose,Doris Kearns Godwin, John Casti, Joe McGinnis, Alan Dershowitz, Lawrence Tribe, Philip Foner, Gail Sheehy and HG Wells. A supplementary page on this site highlights other allegations.

Helen Keller supposedly suffered from cryptomnesia in plagiarising Margaret Canby's The Frost Fairies to produce The Frost King. It has been alleged that Beatle George Harrison plagiarised the Chiffon's He's So Fine in his My Sweet Lord. US academic Kim Lanegran generously provided a copy of her doctoral dissertation on disk, only to find that the recipient had blithely used that text to get a doctorate of his own. eSecurity guru Bruce Schneier and co-authors discovered that two papers had been lifted by an academic and students at an Islamabad university. Ana Rosa Quintana's Sabor a Hiel supposedly featured chunks of Ángeles Mastretta, Danielle Steel and Colleen McCullough. Critics such as Marilyn Piety and Peter Tudvad have claimed that Joakim Garff's 2000 biography of Søren Kierkegaard was similarly endowed by other writers.

In earlier decades Roman poet Martial (died AD103) compared plagiarism to the theft of slaves, particularly heinous because words - like kidnapped slaves - were not able to defend themselves. Laurence Sterne in The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman asked

Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?

Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope? Forever in the same track - for ever at the same
pace?

questions borrowed from the introduction to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr supposedly consoled Mark Twain by saying

Every man alive on the earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he opens his mouth.

     perspectives 

For perspectives on plagiarism, offline and online, we recommend Marcel LaFollette's comprehensive Stealing Into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism & Misconduct in Scientific Publishing (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1992), Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud - American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin (New York: PublicAffairs 2004) by Peter Hoffer, Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud & Politics in the Ivory Tower (New York: New Press 2005) by Jon Wiener, Multiple Authorship & the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1981) by Jack Stillinger, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia: Uni of Pennsylvania Press 2007) by Tilar Mazzeo and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1994) by Francoise Meltzer.

LaFollette is more substantial than Perspectives on Plagiarism & Intellectual Property In A Postmodern World (Albany: State Uni of New York Press 1999), a collection of essays edited by Lise Buranen & Alice Roy, or Rebecca Moore Howard's Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors & Collaborators (Norwood: Ablex 1999).

God's Plagiarist: Being An Account of the Fabulous Industry & Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1994) by R Howard Bloch and Forgers & Critics: Creativity & Duplicity In Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1990) by Anthony Grafton consider pre-digital notions of authenticity - discussed in our forgery profile - and how to turn a quick buck. 

Thomas Mallon's Stolen Words: Forays Into The Origins & Ravages of Plagiarism (New York: Ticknor & Fields 1989) and Neal Bowers' Words For The Taking: The Hunt For A Plagiarist (New York: Norton 1997) are accounts of literary theft. There is a legal analysis in Stuart Green's 2002 Plagiarism, Norms, & the Limits of Theft Law: Some Observations on the Use of Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights (PDF) and Francisco Blázquez' 2005 Plagiarism: An Original Sin? (PDF).

Mark Rose's insightful Authors & Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1993) provides an historical introduction for the West, supplemented by Plagiarism in early modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2003) edited by Paulina Kewes. William Alford's To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilisation (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 1995) is essential reading for appropriation and thinking about creativity and the marketplace in Eastern Asia. 

The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham: Duke Uni Press 1994) is an excellent collection of essays on copyright theory, artistic appropriation and piracy, edited by Martha Woodmansee & Peter Jaszi. 

Judith Anderson's Plagiarism, Copyright Violation & Other Thefts of Intellectual Property: An Annotated Bibliography With A Lengthy Introduction (Jefferson: McFarland 1998) is a detailed bibliographical study of misbehaviour in the US from 1900 to the early 1990s.

The notion of plagiarism or appropriation in the visual and performing arts has gained less support. Bernard Ceysson characterised museums as stud farms of masterpieces that exist to generate 'derivations', while Thierry de Duve quipped that

all artists, even, or especially, the enfant terrible of the avant-garde, draw cheques on tradition.

An overview for the visual arts is provided in Hillel Schwartz's The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books 1997). For music see Peter Burkholder's Annotated Musical Borrowing Bibliography and the Columbia Law Library Music Copyright Infringement Online Archive site.

Among the "information just wants to be free" set plagiarism is derided as yet another gutenberg (non-digital and thus dead) concept. I don't plagiarise, I practice postmodern situationist textual appropriation, ole! Information, it appears, doesn't just want to be free - it wants to have as many authors as possible.

A starting point for exploring the situationist rhetoric is the paper on Utopian Plagiarism: Hypertextuality & Electronic Cultural Production. We confess to difficulty understanding the "neoist" statement here -

Plagiarism is the soft under-belly of linguistic originary presence. Hovering over all the jabbering and pewling of the legal profession and the professoriate, the self-muted mouth of the divine shrouds itself in the cloud of unknowing. ... if you refuse to speak, then I seize the microphones of history and swell out in capitalist expansiveness. In this vein, monopoly becomes necessary, from which plagiarism. ... The invention of God created real estate. It would be better to say that no one owns anything, not even a physical body much less a mind or a soul. The monadic personality fragments, dissolves under the negative impact of totalized ownership of the world. Thus courts of law, writs, record books and ledgers, the unfolding and endlessly self-generating quantization that spins through the brains of the population burst into flames. Alter the inevitable violence in the streets, this is the only form of class upheaval with any possibility of success

and so on.

     studies

Among pointers to online sources of information about plagiarism we commend the UK Plagiarism Advisory Service site, the University of Hartford Plagiarism Web Sources page and the recently updated Le Moyne College seminar on Electronic Plagiarism.

Heyward Ehrlich's Plagiarism & Anti-plagiarism page at Rutgers University offers a brief introduction, along with suggestions for using web search engines for detecting the theft. There is a more detailed examination of those tools in Julie Ryan's paper on Student Plagiarism in An Online World, complemented by the 2006 (Mis)Trusting Technology that Polices Integrity: A Critical Assessment of Turnitin.com papers from Michael Donnelly, Rebecca Ingalls,Tracy Morse, Joanna Castner & Anne Stockdell-Giesler and 2004 'Turn It In': Technological Challenges to Academic Ethics in 4 Education, Communication and Information 2/3 by Jennifer Jenson & Suzanne de Castell.

Student use of term paper mills is explored in a supplementary note; commercial plagiarism identification services are noted below.

Student Cheating & Plagiarism to the Internet Era: A Wake-Up Call for Educators & Parents (New York: Libraries Unlimited 2000) by Ann Lathrop & Kathleen Foss is one of the latest jeremiads to hit the shelves. 

Ronald Standler's useful paper on Plagiarism in Colleges in the USA examines the scale of the problem, discusses specific examples and considers legal remedies. There is an Australian counterpart in the 2000 paper by Peter Clayton, Ann Applebee & Celina Pascoe on Pedagogy, Plagiarism or Pornography: Universities on the Net (PDF). Plagiarism: A Misplaced Emphasis is a paper by info-liberationist Brian Martin, for us less convincing than Alexander Lindey's Plagiarism and Originality (New York: Harper 1952). Bruce Leland's Plagiarism & The Web page is a succinct introduction to online issues. The Plagiary journal features papers of interest.

The US SCOOP - Stop Cases of Online Plagiarism - network is a collective of visual artists and authors concerned about the P word. Plagiarism.org is a California-based service that matches submitted texts against a database of term papers and material on web sites (claimed to cover 800 million pages). Plagiarized.com is another US site offering resources for teachers.

Perhaps as a response to the notion of the web as "the world's greatest copying machine", Australian Digital Theses project coordinator Tony Cargnelutti comments that online academic publication encourages more efficient research and minimises plagiarism:

You're much more at risk of being plagiarised if it sits in a library archive ... When you put the work on the web it is effectively a date stamp.

    detection services

In response to the growth of free or commercial essay sites a number of entrepreneurs offer plagiarism detection services for high school/college teachers. Those services are increasingly being offered

Those services variously test for appropriation from web resources, compare text against a database of papers from an essay mill or check for collusion (students copying from each other or from a previous year's assignments). They compare vocabulary and phrasing, eg identical sentences and paragraphs or keywords.

They include:

Essay Verification Engine (EVE2) - a US product aimed at teachers; users download the software onto their machine/network and use it to compare student texts submitted electronically.

Copycatch - UK "forensic automated collusion and plagiarism" software that compares networked essays within educational institutions

plagiarism.com (Glatt Plagiarism Services) - is a commercial body, independent of plagiarism.org and plagiarized.org, that offers detection software and training programs

WordCheck KeyWORD is a keyword-matching service, comparing a local database of texts with documents that are online or submitted electronically

Digital Integrity's Findsame service is aimed at business and the education sector, marketed as searching for fragments of text rather than keywords. 

IntegriGuard - "the premiere [sic] Internet-based plagiarism detection/prevention company (including paperbin.com and howoriginal.com), aimed at the education sector

JPlag - claimed to "do more than merely compare the text of documents", examining software program language syntax and program structure

CiteMaster, a US commercial service, has been promoted as using "supercomputer processing power" to compare student essays with a proprietary database of books, journals and essays

MyDropBox claims to have searched some 4.3 billion web pages and have a database with 345,000 term-papers in internal database that's parsed by an "innovative artificial intelligence module that actually comprehends the content of each processed document"

Measure of Software Similarity (MOSS) is a tool that has been used to detect plagiarism in software development (eg identifying similarities in C++, Java and Pascal programs)

Renoir Gaither of the University of Michigan has an online evaluation of some of the more popular US plagiarism detection services.

Andy Dehnart's 1999 Salon article on The Web's Plagiarism Police highlights some of the major problems with those services, for example 'false positives' through identifying an appropriately cited quotation as plagiarism. Another critic lambasted Turnitin, the commercial arm of Plagiarism.org, as an unethical "pedagogic placebo".

There is a more detailed assessment in the report (PDF) of the 2001 Electronic Plagiarism Detection workshop for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which highlighted some administrative questions such as student consent and copyright.

Students have on occasion refused to submit work that they knew would be provided to services such as Turnitin, arguing that provision violated their intellectual property or meant that all students were regarded as guilty until proven innocent. Some institutions have responded by allowing students to opt out of submission but require those students to complete one or more alternate assignments to demonstrate that the work was their own. Institutions similarly note that surrender of particular rights and compliance with rules (as mundane as paper size, double-spacing, turning up to the exam on time and not using a mobile phone) is part of education.

Courts have accordingly been unsympathetic in litigation by students, with for example a United States District Court judge in A.V. et. al v. iParadigms, LLC, No.07-293 (E.D. Va. 2007) granting a motion for summary dismissal of copyright infringement claims by four high school students whose work had been incorporated into the Turnitin database. The database operator gained dismissal on the basis of the fair use defense under US copyright law and on the basis that agreement between the students and their school precluded the relief they were seeking.

A later page of this guide considers questions about the role of educational institutions in encouraging awareness of the rights and responsibilities of copyright users (and creators and intermediaries).

     prevalence

The extent of plagiarism by students and their peers is uncertain.

There have been few large-scale independent studies. Some of the more highly-publicised claims regarding plagiarism detection services may over-report the incidence of plagiarism by conflating legitimate (eg attributed quotation) and illicit uses of content.

The extent to which plagiarism has been facilitated by the net is also unclear.

A 2002 study by Patrick Scanlon & David Neumann, based on a survey of 698 undergraduates in the US and Middle East, suggested that students think much more plagiarizing is taking place than they actually report doing.

16.5% reported having "sometimes" appropriated text without a citation; 8% of students reported having done so "often" or "very frequently." 50.4% of students reported that their peers "often" or "very frequently" cut and pasted text from the net without proper citation.

The study also found that the amount of online plagiarism reported by students is comparable to the amount of offline plagiarism from books or other printed sources that has been reported in studies since the 1960s. 24.5% of students reported "often," "very frequently," or "sometimes" having lifted text from the net without proper citation, 27.6% reported having done the same with printed texts. Over 90% reported their peers "often," "very frequently," or "sometimes" copied text from offline sources without citation.

A 2002 study from CAVAL Collaborative Solutions claimed that essays by 8.85% of a sample of Australian university students featured large amounts of unattributed text lifted from the web. The study, on behalf of six Australian universities, used Turnitin software in an examination of 1,751 randomly selected undergraduate and postgraduate essays - from the social sciences, business, computing, education, health sciences and engineering.

In around 9% of the sample a quarter of the essay matched other sources, although it is unclear whether that figure reflects plagiarism. 1.54% of the essays contained greater than 50% of copied material. Two were copied in their entirety.

In the UK Coventry University reported in 2006 that it had identified 237 students lifting text from online, expelling seven students. Nottingham University disciplined 53 students but expelled only one. Oxford, Edinburgh, Durham, Newcastle and Warwick reportedly did not identify any instances warranting expulsion.

A 2001 study by Donald McCabe of Student Cheating in American High Schools covered 4,500 students from twenty-five high schools. 54% had used the net to plagiarise. However, the research suggested that most of those cheating would have plagiarized without the net and only 6% of the plagiarists had relied solely on the net. 22% had submitted work done by their parents. Many students did not see anything wrong with cheating (or were merely feeling frisky when completing the questionnaire): around 50% said they didn't think copying questions and answers from a test was cheating.

Educause (PDF) notes that 66% of students (and parents) in another survey said that cheating "didn't seem like a big deal." That is consistent with the report of Penn State Uni's 1999 PULSE survey on academic integrity. In US focus groups involving high school students there was widespread agreement that

Many of our teachers are clueless when it comes to the Internet, the material you can find on the Internet is of sufficient quality to submit on your assignments, and paper topics are usually so broad that your teachers are not at all likely to recognise a source you might use.

Scanlon & Neuman however notes that student practice is context sensitive, affected by the example of peers, assessment of risk, and understanding of what's involved. Educause refers to a Berkeley neurobiology professor who found that 45 of 320 students had plagiarised at least part of their term paper from the net; 15% plagiarised after warnings that he would use anti-plagiarism technology.

McCabe suggests that attitudes are changing:

High-school students who are growing up with the Internet, they're having real difficulty distinguishing what is and is not plagiarism. Many of them are developing an attitude that anything on the Internet is public domain, and they're not seeing copying it as cheating.

Issues of whistleblowing are discussed in more detail here.

     a problem outside the academy? 

The extent of plagiarism outside the secondary and tertiary education sectors is unknown.

Most attention has focussed on egregious cases in the US, where journalists in leading publications such as New Republic and New York Times have 'lifted' someone else's text. There have been similar incidents involving Australian authors and radio figures, some of whom - disingenously or otherwise - have blamed their researchers. It is occurring in government and industry (we were for examply wryly amused to see that one Commonwealth official had appropriated pages from this site without attribution or even paraphrase).

In a progression similar to that found in internet content filtering, plagiarism detection services are now marketing to businesses and government agencies, in particular publishers, law firms, recruitment specialists and producers/consumers of consultancy reports. United Nations agencies, for example, are reported to use iThenticate (the business version of Turnitin) in checking documentation provided by contractors. Some services feature access to commercial databases such as Lexis-Nexis.

Uptake of the services is uncertain. iThenticate's promoter forecasts significant growth, commenting to the NY Times in 2004 that in business "the stakes are 100 times greater ... We're not talking about grades anymore".

     ghostwriting 

This site features a supplementary note on ghosting, the practice of hiring an author or other creator to write a text, compose a score or devise a visual artwork that is then presented as work created by the commissioner.

   next page  (moral rights)