Plagiarism Resource Site

The Chronicle offers an article on four plagiarizing professors, who aren't well-known or notorious. The point is to suggest that research plagiarism is widespread. "It's like cockroaches," says Peter Charles Hoffer, a University of Georgia historian and author of a recent book about academic fraud. "For every one you see on the kitchen floor, there are a hundred behind the stove."

The Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools voted to drop Edward Waters from membership two months after the college "acknowledged that it had plagiarized material from another college in a document crucial for its reaccreditation bid."

Barnard College signs on for a one-year trial subscription to the plagiarism detection service, Turnitin.com.

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.'"

Google's new service, Google Scholar, allows users to search "scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." Concerns about it's possible misuse have already begun to appear.

In a complaint directed at Peter Charles Hoffer, professor of history at the University of Georgia, B Timothy Noah identifies one way that plagiarism creeps into a scholar's research: "inaccuracy due to laziness."

According to Brian Martin, plagiarism is conventionally seen as a serious breach of scholarly ethics, being a theft of credit for ideas in a competitive intellectual marketplace. This emphasis overlooks the vast amount of institutionalized plagiarism, including ghostwriting and attribution of authorship to bureaucratic elites. There is a case for reducing the stigma for competitive plagiarism while exposing and challenging the institutionalized varieties.

"To turn back a rising trend of plagiarism incidents, UC Berkeley faculty may step up efforts to identify and punish cheating by creating a new grading category on transcripts or purchasing new campuswide anti-plagiarism software." See Daily Californian Online.

Indiana University Pennsylvania provides students with Writenote and Endnote to help avoid plagiarism. And offer the Turnitin service to faculty to help detect plagiarism.

Swedish universities are suspending "an increasing number of students" on account of plagiarism. Tina Israelsson at the national body of universities and colleges suggests that the increase in suspensions does not necessarily mean that cheating is on the rise, but rather that "universities are just getting better at spotting plagiarism.