Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credits and usually claiming them to be one’s own. It is an old but ever growing problem, especially in the academic world.
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Plagiarism is the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credits and usually claiming them to be one’s own. It is an old but ever growing problem, especially in the academic world.
The daily use of internet has made some students less sensitive to authorial ownership or materials available online. This leads to a student writer paraphrasing material he or she reads on an online Encyclopedia or professional website, and forgetting to properly cite. They don’t understand the ‘common knowledge’ principle and apply it to material that is in no way common and often very specific and specialized. This includes material that uses specific names, dates , things like economic theories or educational regulations that the average reader would have no way of knowing.
The largest change that I see in the last ten years is an increasing weakness in a skill called modeling. This increases plagiarism, because students do not copy anything exactly when they take notes. They even misinterpret source material, because what they write in their notes does not fairly represent what the author or authors wrote. How this influences plagiarism is that students have text books that give them examples of how to correctly cite in MLA, APA, and Chicago citation style, but they are somehow unable to copy the format correctly. When that incorrect citation makes it into a formal academic paper, it fails to meet the requirements to acknowledge the original source and all the lines of typing that refer to that idea or that data are considered unoriginal material. If students do this repeatedly, the percentage of unoriginal material exceeds the acceptable level.
One reason that this skill is so low is that in their K-12 life, many students were given handouts or online outlines and not required to take physical notes. They never learned this skill and are unable to record what is being discussed in class or written on the board or on an electronic screen. So, while the professor is explaining and showing how to correctly credit author material, the present student body is not able to write down and therefore commit to memory, what the teacher has said. This is a frustrating situation from both sides of the desk.
It is true the Internet has made it easier for students to plagiarize. The Internet has been a part of schools since at least the mid 90s. Though its use and commonality has increased with time, schools were creating online newspapers, teaching Internet research and generally surfing the Web. While there has been an increase in retractions related to plagiarism in recent years, much of it is attributed to better detection of plagiarism and stronger enforcement of plagiarism rules, not simply there being more plagiarism. When it comes to plagiarism, technology has been a double-edged sword. On one hand it has made plagiarism itself much easier, streamlining the process of finding content to plagiarize and bringing the duplicated material into a new work. On the other, it’s made plagiarism much easier to detect and prevent, creating tools to both catch mistakes and stop those who are acting in bad faith. The truth is that most researchers, like most students, are honest and for them technology has been a boon. Not only does it make writing and researching easier, but the plagiarism detection tools make it easier to catch oversights before they lead to retractions or rejections. It’s only for those who seek to be dishonest that the technology has been both a blessing and a curse. While we won’t know what the long term impact of the Internet is on research for a long time to come, early indications are that it hasn’t been nearly the catastrophe many have feared. Most young researchers are doing well, despite having grown up and lived with the Internet most of their lives. Though many fear that technology is going to create a generation of plagiarists, so far that hasn’t panned out. Though technology, in some ways, enables plagiarism it also, through plagiarism detection tools, restricts and prevents it. Though the onus still falls on teachers, professors and editors to teach and look for plagiarism, with 88 percent of teachers surveyed saying they are doing just that, it seems at least teachers are getting better at it, not worse.
So while technology will inevitably have an impact on plagiarism, it won’t be the catastrophe many fear, due to a combination of teaching and technology. The young researchers of today are proving that point and the young researchers of tomorrow almost certainly will too.