Detecting Plagiarism

Plagiarism is commonplace. Detecting plagiarism is sometimes very easy, such as in the case of a student using language or phrasing usual for an undergraduate, and sometimes very difficult, as in cases in which students turn in papers from paper mill sites. Many universities subscribe to Turnitin.com, a subscription-based plagiarism-detection service that requires students to upload their papers onto the website. I've used Turnitin one or two semesters many years ago. This is an educational and personal philosophy but I prefer to assume that students are honest rather than submit all students to what some consider an intellectual-frisk. Given that it's estimated that up to 75% of students commit breaches of academic honesty, I'm probably missing quite a few. In fact, I could (and perhaps later will) tell stories….

Using Intuition to Detect Plagiarism
So, what's my preferred method of detecting plagiarism? Google. It starts with intuition. Just type a suspect sentence or phrase in (with and without quotation marks) and you'll likely be surprised of what you find. Particularly troubling to me are papers that come from student paper mills. These papers are written by college students (who are willing to let others represent their work as their own) and the papers are not well written. Because they're poorly written "average" papers, many professors (myself included) don't detect them as plagiarism. I recently discovered one such case by accident - and I was floored to find that all of this student's "average" grades were plagiarized papers. Yikes! That said, I still prefer to believe that students are innocent and honest rather than force all of my students to run their papers through an X-ray machine. This is a personal/professional preference (or delusion, perhaps).

Plagiarism Detection Software
A much more systematic and comprehensive approach to detecting plagiarism is to use software that compares student papers with material available on the Internet. If you prefer to use software to scan students' papers (and do not have access to a paid-subscriber site such as Turnitin) there are a few choices. I have not used these in my professional work. It appears that many operate as modified and/or expanded search engines. Given that nearly all cases of plagiarism entail copying Web resources, each of these should be effective.

Plagium
Cut and paste suspect text into a text window.

SeeSources
Cut and paste suspect text or upload entire papers as Word, HTML, or text document.

eTBLAST 3.0
Cut and paste text or upload entire papers as Word, HTML, or text documents.

Chimpsky
From the University of Waterloo. Requires a free login.