July 14, 2001

SPINNING A WEB SNARE FOR STUDENT PLAGIARISTS

The arms race between students who plagiarize and professors who try to catch them at it is escalating in Internet time.

Students with both a Web browser and a term-paper deadline are understandably tempted to use the first to meet the second. Perhaps it doesn't occur to them that what a search engine finds for them, it will find just as quickly for their teachers.

Instructors even have some high-powered help in searching. Among a number of companies that offer plagiarism-detection services to high schools and colleges is one called Turnitin.com.

``The service compares the paper against millions of Web sites, a database of previous submissions and papers offered by the so-called term-paper mills,'' The New York Times said in a June 28 story.

Turnitin's founder and president, John Barrie, told the Times that nearly a third of all the papers submitted are copied in whole or in part from another source.

Another article on plagiarism, from the July 6 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, quotes Barrie as saying that the service finds a match in about 20 percent of the papers submitted. ``A few of those matches, however, turn out to be legitimate citations,'' the Chronicle adds.

The Times and the Chronicle are writing about the same subject at almost the same time not because they are copying each other but because both are following up on news stories about a plagiarism case from the University of Virginia. Physics professor Louis Bloomfield tested 1,850 papers he had received over several years, and found 122 suspect papers.

That's a lot, even given that only half of them are copies. Never mind the software-matching; wouldn't you think the plagiarists would worry that the professor might remember reading their papers before?

But then the students I caught when I was teaching were always surprised. Never having read 30 papers on the same topic in close succession, they don't realize how idiosyncratic writing is. Take any sentiment much more complicated than ``Good morning,'' and no two people will express it exactly the same way.

How detailed a writer's acknowledgements ought to be depends somewhat on what kind of writing it is. Scholarly papers are expected to be lavishly footnoted with citations, not only to ensure that the writer doesn't pass off another's work as his own (and not incidentally to display how learned the writer is), but also to allow other scholars to check his sources. That's why authors cite even their own previously published articles.

Newspapers don't use footnotes, and news stories freely paraphrase from the paper's previously published stories on the same subject, even though they may be written by different reporters. And editorials, which are understood to express the institutional view of the newspaper, use material from the paper's own news stories without necessarily saying so every time.

The figure of ``1,850 papers'' I cited above comes from the Chronicle article, as it happens. But I've already told you what my sources for this column are; except for purposes of illustration, as here, I wouldn't normally continue to attribute every single fact in a column separately.

But that doesn't mean a journalist can use just anything. Once I was reading a news story (not in this paper, or this city) and thought, ``I've read this before.''

So I had, four to six paragraphs of it, in a magazine article published a few weeks earlier. I sent the newspaper a copy of the article, with the similar passages marked, and got back a somewhat huffy letter from an editor who told me the reporter had indeed read the article before writing his story, but after due consideration, his editors had decided he had used the material appropriately.

Sorry, no. If I could spot the source, it needed attribution.

Or better disguising.

The classic book on plagiarism is Thomas Mallon's wonderfully entertaining Stolen Words, published in 1989. In an afterword to the 2001 edition he recounts how professors of literary theory panned his book for insisting on the idea of authorship.

``Yes, that would be me,'' he says cheerfully. He quotes Rebecca Moore Howard, an expert on student writing, as saying, ``If there is no originality, there is no basis for literary property. If there is no originality and no literary property, there is no basis for the notion of plagiarism.''

As he says, even these professors don't really believe their theories.

``If they catch someone pilfering their own bibliographies, you can count on a cry of bloody murder, not an invitation to hermeneutics,'' he says.

True enough, but if they keep teaching their students plagiarism is no big deal, we can expect the plagiarism arms race to reach warp speed all too soon.

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