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Plagiarism: Prevention & Detection

 

Prevention

Many faculty members find that emphasizing from the beginning the seriousness of plagiarism and its consequences helps stem the tide of both inadvertent and conscious plagiarism. The campus Policy on Academic Dishonesty provides a variety of ideas.  Librarians also recommend:

  1. Let the students know that Blackboard incorporates SafeAssign, an anti-plagiarism software.
  2. Include the Avoiding Plagiarism - A Guide For Students website on your syllabus. (http://libweb.uoregon.edu/guides/plagiarism/students) . 
  3. Give students a range of specific research paper topics rather than a general topic.  If students propose their own topics, do not accept broad or general topics.
  4. Require students to submit a photocopy or printout of the first page of the materials (journal articles, books, primary sources, webpages, and so on.) used in their papers. 
  5. Include the Citation Style Guides (http://libweb.uoregon.edu/guides/citing/) on your syllabus or assignment handout to make proper citing easier for students. It also lists where to find the complete style manuals in the UO Libraries.

Detection

The following tips are helpful in detecting various forms of electronic plagiarism:

  1. Use Blackboard's anti-plagiarism software SafeAssign
  2. Type some of the most unique questionable text into Google (http://www.google.com) or another search engine.  Use quotes around a phrase if you suspect a verbatim quote.
  3. If you have students turn their papers in electronically try changing the margins. Often, text pasted from electronic sources will have hidden or embedded formatting values that will stand out when the margins are changed.
  4. Some students plagiarize from the abstract of an article in one of the Library's databases. Do a keyword/phrase search in the relevant disciplinary index(es).
  5. Search the web papermills for papers on your assigned topic, or do a keyword search on a student's paper title. Most papermills let you see a title and description of the paper, but to see the full text there is a charge. Following are a few such papermill websites:
    Evil House of Cheat (a.k.a. Cheathouse)
    RealPAPERS.com
    Research Papers Online
       

Listed below are some of the companies offering services to help detect plagiarism; some have nominal fees for individuals or offer site licenses for institutions. 

Maintained by: Barbara Jenkins, jenkins@uoregon.edu