Plagiarism Resource Site

The Joint Information Systems Committee has published guidelines on plagiarism and have sent the document, "Deterring, Detecting and Dealing with Student Plagiarism," to all UK universities and HE colleges.

Reported cases of plagiarism have practically doubled at the University of Washington. "'In 2002 there were 35 reported cases; last year there were 66,' said Amanda Myhre, the administrative assistant to the vice president for student affairs." The article, reported in the UW Daily, goes on to confuse plagiarism with other forms of academic dishonesty: "More than 75 percent of college students admit to having cheated at least once on tests or having copied papers, according to the Center for Academic Integrity's Web site." Increasingly, reports on plagiarism confuse it with other forms of academic dishonesty.

SafeAssignment, a plagiarism detection technology, works as a plug-in in conjunction with BlackBoard. Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern use the detection software from within Blackboard.

The Stanford Daily discusses campus-wide efforts to combat and discourage student plagiarism.

A recent editorial in the Boise State newspaper suggests that careful and conscientious citation of sources is the best way to avoid plagiarism.

Commenting on plagiarism at Michigan State, University ombudsman Stan Soffin claims that "in the past few years he hasn't seen an increase in plagiarism, but an increase in professors choosing to punish students. 'Faculty members, I believe, are more inclined to pursue students who have cheated than they were several years ago.'"

Recent admissions of inadvertent plagiarism by two prominent Harvard law professors, Charles Ogletree and Laurence Tribe, have drawn attention to a largely undiscussed aspect of plagiarism -- "the phenomenon of managed books . . . in which some academics rely on assistants to help produce books, in some cases allowing the assistants to write first drafts." See "Harvard in a Quandary" for further details.

Malcolm Gladwell's "Something Borrowed" explores a plagiarism charge in some complexity, identifying ambiguities. So why didn't she credit me and Lewis? How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn't have an answer. 'I thought it was O.K. to use it,' she said with an embarrassed shrug. 'It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.'

Donald McCabe recently spoke at Central Michigan University, where he enumerated some old and new statistics. During the course of his various surveys, he's found that upwards to two-thirds of students have cheated; he's also found that "44 percent of faculty members have ignored cheating and 52 percent have never reported cheating to their superiors."

A defense lawyer for Lorillard Tobacco accused "a witness for the U.S. government of plagiarism" in an attempt "to undermine his testimony." According to the defense, the witness, Michael Weitzman, a pediatric scientist, had "transplanted" large parts of a 1999 World Health Organization report into the conclusions of his own trial report on how parents' smoking affects children.