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Mouse Click Plagiarism:The Role of Technology in Plagiarism andthe Librarian’s Role in Combating It

NICOLE AND ELLEN M. KRUPAR. AUER

ABSTRACTTHE PROLIFERATION OF PAPER MILLS, FULL-TEXT DATABASES, nd WorldWide Web pages has made plagiarism a rapidly growing problem inacademia. Possible factors influencing student behaviors and attitudestoward plagiarism include ignorance, lack of personal investment in their

education, situational ethics, and lack of consistent styles among and withinvarious disciplines. Librarians are in a unique position to help preventan d detect plagiarism by forming partnerships with faculty to re-examineassignments and instructional sessions and by informing them of Internetpaper mills an d useful Internet search strategies.

INTRODUCTIONIn a Seattle Timesarticle, Leon Geyer, the faculty advisor for the under-

graduate ho no r system at Virginia Tech, was quoted as saying: “In the

olden days, a student had to go to the library, dig up the information andretype it. Now you can sit in your dorm room an djus t reach out, point andcl ic k (Benning, 1998, paragraph 8). Benning further stated: “Teachersand administrators agree cheating is on the rise-computers have made itso easy” (paragraph 4).

HISTORICALERSPECTIVEAs Wilson Mizner said: “When you steal from one author, it’s plagia-

rism; ifyou steal from many, it’s research” (quoted in Bartlett, 1992, p. 631).

Nicole J. Auer, Library, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA24061-0434Ellen M . Krupar, Library, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg,VA 24061LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 49, No. 3, Winter 2001, pp. 415-432

2001 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois



416 LIBRARY TRENDS/WINTER 2001

Plagiarism was probably the second idea. Views on plagiarism have changedover time. Often, imitation in phrasing or style has been seen as compli-mentary or respecting the learned masters. In some art, using the samemotifs or arrangements to reflect o n a historical manner of creation is theproper thing to do. Students also learned how to d o something by copy-ing a finished piece. Even today, students of art paint imitations of greatworks in order to learn techniques such as brush strokes, use of color, ordepiction of perspective. However, in such cases, the students are not pass-ing off these imitations as an original expression of a creative impulse.Today, many students are stealing material from the Internet and turning

it in as their own work, either directly from paper mills o r by “cutting andpbting“ ; 0111 p’hges;-ivi’dkbm - k k h C h i a n - - ; ? &sl-’. &s +?kquotes teachers as saying that “cheating, especially in the form of plagia-rized term papers, is on the rise because of the easy availability of materialon the Internet” (paragraph 2).

THE PROBLEMCases from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Vir-

ginia Tech) Undergraduate Hono r System Web site illustrate what we, as a

profession, must p repare ourselves an d o ur faculties to confront. Figure 1shows the honor court statistics at Virginia Tech for the last three yearswhich clearly illustrate a marked increase in the total number of honorcode violations in that short amount of time. Interestingly, half the casesfo r 1998/1999 were reported during exam week.

cademic ear

I Number of Cases

Guilty by JudicialPanel and affirmedby Review Board

Not Guilty byJudicial Panel

Dismissal by ReviewBoard or Chief Justice

Other-pending,

transferred toGraduate HonorSystem

*230 cases since April 30,1999

Figure 1. Judicial Statistics for the Virginia Tech Undergraduate Honor System.



AUER AN D KRUPAR/MOUS E CLICK PLAGIARISM 417

One sample case involved four students who all turned in the same, o rnearly the same, paper in the same class. In contrast to traditional methodsof plagiarism, the students did no t copy off each other o r take from a stockof papers available at a local campus fraternity or sorority. Instead, studentsused computers to search the Internet for the same assigned topic in thesame paper mills and happened to select the same paper to propose astheir own work. All four were found guilty and given Class sanctions which,according to the Virgmia Tech Honor System Constitution, includes honorsystem probation and education, recommended double-weighted zero onthe assignment or o n any grade affected by the offense, and fifty hours of

university service (TrialAbstracts, n.d., paragraph 8 ) .

CONTRIBUTINGACTORSSeveral theories are proposed to explain the recent increase in pla-

giarism cases. Contributing to the explosion of plagiarism, particularlyinvolving Internet-based resources, is the historically libertarian nature ofthe Internet where commentary is free-wheeling and anti-establishment.Gresham (1996) states that library users have trouble realizing that Internetmaterial is intellectual pro per ty worthy of pro pe r citation. In fact,

Macdonald an d Dunkelberger (1998) found that only 7 percent of theirsample of students cited information found on CD-ROM or via the Internetas coming from an online source but rather cited the information as corn-ing from a print source.

Compounding this issue is the lack of consistency among citation styleguides, particularly regarding online information (Malone & Videon, 1997;Fletcher & Greenhill, 1995). Fletcher an d Greenhill (1995) found Xia Lian d Nancy Crane’s (1993) work Electronic Style:A h i d e o Citing ElectronicInformation to be the only style guide with a consistent system for citing

online information. Although this work was originally published beforethe widespread use of HTML, the 1996 revision includes citations for WorldWide Web documents. The latest print Publication Manual of the AmericanPsychologzcal Association M A ) , copyright 1994, does not adequately ad-dress online information. There is an update on the M A Web site (“Elec-tronic Reference,” 2000), but it still does not cover all types of onlineinformation such as listserv postings. Further, there are a n umber of Websites providing individual interpreta tions of the different styles, with n oofficial blessing by the professional associations. More importantly, each

of the different citation styles uses such different formats, requiring dif-ferent bits of information. It is not uncommon for a student to becomevery confused between APA an d Modern Language Association styles. De-pending on what the professor prefers or the discipline of study, a studentmay be required to use four different styles in o ne semester. It is no won-der that sometimes the student gives up and does not cite informationproperly.




Further, some students do no t know what plagiarism is or, if they knowthat it is wrong, they do n ot understand at what poin t using sources passesinto plagiarism. Students’ understanding, or misunderstanding, of theconcepts of collaboration, fair use, and plagiarism can lead to the act ofplagiarism itself (Maramack & Maline, 1993). Indeed , students “often can-not tell the difference between correctly paraphrased versus plagiarizedtext” (Roig & DeTommaso, 1995, p. 694) . Most students, particularly first-year students who often think in concrete terms of black-and-white, re-quire clear-cut examples to demonstrate the fine line between paraphras-ing an d plagiarizing. Some definitions, including two that are local to ou r

institution, include:Plagiarism-Plagiarism includes the copying of the language, struc-ture, ideas an d/o r thoughts of an ot he r and passing off same as one’sown, original work, or attempts thereof.-Undergraduate Hon orSystem (http://fbox.vt.edu:lOOZl/studentinfo/ugradhonor/html/definitions. htm l)

Cheating-The definition of cheating is to knowingly use unautho-rized assistance in submitted work as one’s own efforts or to know-ingly submit another’s works as one’s own ideas, thereby intendingto gain an unfair advantage, or in ten din g to deceive or mislead. Ac-tions tha t assist ano the r to d o these things also constitute cheating.-VA Corp of Cadets (http://www.vtcc.vt.edu/cadet-life/honor-system. h tm)

Plagiarism. The action or practice of plagiarizing; the wrongful ap-propriation or p urloining, an d publication as one’s own, of the ideas,or t he expression of th e ideas (literary, artistic, musical, mech anical,etc.) of another.-Oxford English Dic tio naq 1989

Cheryl Ruggiero (n.d .-a), professor of English at Virginia Tech, created

an online tutorial to help her students identify the many forms of plagia-rism (see Figure 2 for examples that she uses to illustrate the differences).

Cutting and pasting from computer-based information using net-worked computers is easier than retyping material from a book. This isoften compounded by the recent t rend of university-wide computing re-quirements , where universities require students to arrive on campus witha computer. Since all students are required to have computers, they arenow capable of cut and paste plagiarism. In a recent N m Yo Timesarticle,it was poin ted ou t that cheating is now “soeffortless” that students may be

“inured to the ethical or legal consequences,” thinking it no worse thanexceeding the speed limit (Zack, 1998, paragraph 5 ) . Students believethat they have as little chance of being caught as when they are speedingdown the road . Speed is a factor, with technology eliminating the oppor-tunity to reflect dur ing the writing process. Cutting and pasting from theInte rnet an d word processing in general is much faster than retyping on atypewriter. This leads to carelessness in thought, carelessness in citing



A U E R AND KRUPAR/MOUSE CLICK PLAGIARISM 419~~

The OriginalMaterial

’laparism byirect Cobving

’lagiarism by’arabhrasing

’lagiarism bymhcft f an Idea

The association between humansand dogs began as a hunt ing rela-tionship before organized agricul-ture had been developed. ThisPaleolithic cave painting datesback to about ten thousand yearsago and shows a Stone Age hunte rwho has successfully killed aneland with the assistance of hisdogs.-Plate 2, following Page 150The Intelligence ofDogs: Canine Con-sciousness and Capabilities by

Stanley Coren. MacMillan, 1994~ ~ ~~

Dogs have be en “man ’s bestfr ie nd” since long before re-corded history. The associationbetween humans and dogs beganas a hunting relationshir, beforeorganized agriculture had beendeveloped. One Paleolithic cavepainting dates back to about tenthousand years ago and shows aStone Age hunter who has success-fully killed an eland with the as-sistance of his dogs.

Dogs have be en “man’ s bestfriend” since long before re-corded history. The relationshipbe tween does and humansstarted as a hunting relationshipbefore people develoDed orea-nized agr icul ture . On e cavepainting that dates back aboutten thousand Years shows a Pale-olithic hunter who has killed aneland with the help of his dogs.

Dogs have be en “man’s bestfriend” since long before re-corded history. Dogs and humansfirst got together as hunters. Cavepaintings provide some evidencefor this early teamwork. One10.000-vear-old painting shows a

Paleolithic hunter and his twodogs after thev have killed aneland.

Explanation:

The student has typedin Coren’s words ex-actly in the first copiedsentence and alteredonly one word in thesecond.

The student has re-ar-ranged a few wordsan d substituted a fewof her own words, butthe idea and the or-der of developmentare Coren’s.

The student has puthe ideas in her ownwords, but thosevords imply that SHEiiscovered the team-work and the caveJainting through her

w n research, since:oren’s idea and re-#earth a re no t a c -mowledged.

Figure 2. Examples of plagiarism that illustrate plagiarism by direct copying, byparaphrasing, and by theft of an idea (Used with permission. Source: ht tp:/ /www.english.vt.edu/ 7EIDLE/plagiarism/plagiarism3.html).




material, and ultimately to plagiarism. This speed can even lead to care-lessness in plagiarism, where many students d o not even effectively coverup their plagiarism. A colleague at another academic university was toldby a professor that he is often able to spot cases where students have pla-giarized by cutting and pasting from the Inte rnet because the plagiaristsare so careless that they do not change the font of the Web material tomatch the rest of the document.

The Center for Academic Integrity reports that “cheating is highestin those courses where it is well known that faculty ignore cheating o r failto report it to authorities” (ResearchHighlights,n.d., paragraph 5). Maramark

an d Maline (1993) repo rt o n studies which indicate that “cheating is lesslikely to occur when there are threats of detection or sanction” (p. 5). Ittherefore can be seen that a campus environment that is casual in dealingwith instances of cheating may itself encourage it. In a study of why stu-dents cheat, McCabe and Trevino (1993) found that “t he perception ofpeers’ behavior [may provide] a kind of normative support for cheating”(p. 5 3 3 ) .

STUDENT TTITUDES

Causing students to really care about plagiarism is more importantthan mere explanations of its illegality. Caring is the important part. T hereare Web paper mills boasting slogans such as “Download your Workload”and offers papers such as ”The Impact of Institutional Investors on theSecurities Market.” This essay from 1984 is available from the A1 TermPaper site for $71.60 (http://www.al-termpaper.com/bus-stkshtml) Defi-nitions o r examples alone are no t likely to convince a student with accessto that site to resist plagiarism and instead stay up until 3 A.M. to get thepaper done. Temptation to buy that paper rather than slog through the

writing can overcome all fear of being caught. And if a professor has as-signed a paper that is more specialized and not available in the generalpaper mill area, a foresighted student can commission a paper do ne onany particular topic. Customization means, of course, that the price goesup. For the price of 20 for the first page, $10 for each additional page,$10 for a bibliography, $10 for footnotes a nd the wait of three to four daysfor e-mail delivery, a student can have a paper written to the exact specifi-cations of the professor. s an added benefit, students have all that timeoff from working on the paper. Roig an d DeTommaso (1995) studied the

relationship between procrastination and academic dishonesty and foun dtha t “students who score high o n academic procrastination may be morelikely to engage in plagiaristic practices” (p . 694) .

Worst of all are the students who are no t gradually seduced into theconvenience of a paper mill, bu t who know from the s tart that it is wrongbu t do not care-defiantly do no t care. A student told on e of the authorsto he r face that she could not prove that h e would not cheat o n the home-



AUER AN D KRUPAR/MOUSE CLICK PLAGIARISM 421

work she had assigned him. Ironically, a few minutes later, he was signingup for ano ther section of the class, an ethics challenge. He did not under-stand when h er reaction was to sarcastically wish him luck on the ethicschallenge. Th e Center for Academic Integrity reports that results fromsurveys conducted in 1990, 1992, and 1995 indicate that 75 percent ofstudents self-report some cheating while “almost 80% of undergraduatestudent respondents reported one or more incidents of cheating” Research Highlights, n.d., paragraph 2).

An English professor at a well respected university, who requestedanonymity, posted this story un der the subject heading, “A classroom first

... to an Internet listserv:

Just by chance last semester I was grading final papers and discov-ered, while cruising websites on mind-altering drugs (the final paperwas based on the Aldous Huxley novel *Brave New World*) that astudent had lifted two or three entire paragraphs from an amateur-ish website on Prozac. It was the sort of plagiarism tha t is very hard tospot because the lifted material wasn’t of much better quality thanthe student’s own writing. However, I recognized the passage. I noti-fied my department chair and gave her [the student] an F for thepaper. She still passed the class (though now I wonder what other

papers contained plagiarized material that I just didn’t catch). WhenI returned her outraged phon e call, she kept saying, “I can’t believeyou’re doing this to me I worked so hard in this class ”

The professor’s conclusion? Her students have a “consumer mentality whenit comes to grades, and seem to believe that they should get grades basedon effort rather than o n achievement.”

And why shouldn’t students have this atttitude? Universities have alsofallen prey to the consumer mentality, this time directed at students. Withthe proliferation of “Maymesters,” which contrive to give the illusion that

you can condense a semester’s worth of learning in to a short few weeks,universities have given up some of the pretense that learning is the pur-pose of classes. One of ou r colleagues at ano ther academic library, whenconfron ted with a maymester student, said “Thank you for your money.”With students cut off by time constraints from interlibrary loan, retrievalof articles, o r even the time to analyze information, what exact messageare the students receiving on the value of any knowledge they may acci-dentally glean from their frantically paced class? As the television charac-ter PresidentJed Bartlet of The West Wingsaid in the episode “What Kind

of Day Has It Been?” when speaking of youth apathy on voting: “Are wefailing you or are you failing us? . . . A little of both” (episode 22, season 1,May 17, 2000).

This is compounded by the change in purpose of university atten-dance from actually learning something to getting a jo b with the degreethat signifies that you supposedly learned something, even if it is focusedon learning how to learn (Fain & Bates, 2000). In a consumer society,




students have been trained in the fine art of cost/benefit analysis. Severalyears ago, one of the authors objected to a change in terminology forlibrary users from “patron” to “customers” because the latter encouragesthe attitude that students have paid for information rather than for theopportunity to learn how to learn. Somewhere the learn ing of the indi-vidual becomes separated f romjust getting the work done , leading to situ-ations where students justify plagiarism and cheating based on variousfactors such as the assignment, the professor, the class size, and the im-portance of the grade. These situational ethics are seen in the results of asurvey done by Michael Moffatt (19 90), who found that one way students“fine-tune their situational moralities is to claim they only cheat in theunimportant courses they ‘have-to take’ in college, never in their majors’’(p . 16). For some students , all of the courses in college are ones that they“have-to take.” These students need a college degree for entry to a par-ticular jo b o r ca reer and may see little of no justification for that require-ment . Even within librarianship, library school can be considered a rub-ber stamp that you need to get in order to work in the profession ratherthan an actual learning experience. A former teacher sent a condemna-tion of this trend to one of the authors under the subject line, “College-

Educated Cashiers.” Too many of her students were only in college be-cause their careers required a bachelors degree as an entry requirement,even though years ago those jobs did not require college degrees. Shedecried the fact that these students were wasting four years getting a de-gree when they should have spen t time accumulating experience in theircareers. The result was that these students were not interested in learn ingand diminished the educational experience for those students who didwant to be in her classes (McGee, personal communication, 2000).

Students may also no t be as personally interested in their own educa-

tion versus their career aspirations. Haines, Diekhoff, LaBeff, and Clark(1986) found in a study of cheating that s tudents who were not paying fortheir own tuition and books were more likely to cheat, perhaps due to alack of “personal financial investment” in their education (p. 352). Evenstudents who are concerned about the learning part of their educationmayjustify plagiarism based on the fear that others are already cheating,causing “unfair competition” (Fain &Bates, 2000). Donald McCabe (1992)of Rutgers University talks about the denial of responsibility of academicdishonesty by students who justify cheating based on the behavior of their

classmates (p . 369).Perhaps an additional problem is that there are varying responses to

plagiarism outside academia. Even though the journalism world is a worldof words, depending on the concept of intellectual property, when TrudyLieberman (1995) examined “twenty newspaper and magazine plagiarismcases” since 1988, she found that the “punishment is uneven, rangingfrom severe to virtually nothing even for major offenses” (paragraphs 4,7 ,



AUER AN D KRUPAR/MOUSE CLICK PLAGIARISM 423

p. 22) .The for-profit world of the visual arts (movies, television, painting,photography, and so forth ) takes plagiarism much more seriously. For ex-ample, the creator of Babylon 5 a science fiction television show, had astanding policy that fans no t send him story ideas or even speculations o nwhat was going to happen. The reason was that if anything even vaguelymatched what he did in the show, he was open to being sued by that per-son. Despite his policy, one of his fans did send him a speculative note ,resulting in the fan having to sign a legal document that he would not suebefore the show was filmed (Wexelblat, 1996). In the world of writtenfiction, many major authors will no t read new authors’ manuscripts, fear-

ing that they will be sued for stealing someone else’s work.

FACULTYATTITUDESFaculty are often re luctant to report students for plagiarism for a com-

plex array of reasons. Maramark and Maline (1993) list some of thesereasons: “lack of knowledge of institutional procedures,” “cases are diffi-cult to prove,” “sanctions are inappropriate for offense,” the likelihood ofdamaging “ the student’s reputation or career,” that it would “reflect nega-tively on their teaching skills,” an d “fear of litigation” (p . 6 ) . Sometimes

the faculty member may lack the knowledge of how to report i t or whatwill be the consequences for the student. Donald McCabe of Rutgers Uni-versity conduc ted a faculty survey in 1993 to determine whether facultyhad ever reported cheating. Among 800 professors at sixteen institutions,40 percent said “never,” 54 percent said “seldom,” and only 6 percent said“often” (Schneider, 1999, p. A8 . While part of the results could havebeen from confusion of what the different levels of plagiarism are (afterall, what does “often” mean to you? Once a semester? Twice in an aca-demic year? Twice in an academic caree r?) , t does show that being caught

for plagiarism is on a par with being caught for driving over the speedlimit-a lot more people are doing it than are being caught. Singhal(l982)surveyed eighty Arizona State University ( M U ) faculty and found that“while 65% of the faculty caught students cheating in some form, only21 of them reported it to the M U administration a nd only 57% of thefaculty covered the topic of cheating in their course orien tation” (p. 778).Sometimes a professor would prefer to work out the violation with thestudent directly rather than have the violation be part of the student’spermanent academic record. In a case involving one of the authors, a

student had obviously copied the work of another student o n on e of thethree library homework assignments, which are part of the student’s finalgrade for the class. The matter was turned over to the professor who wasreluctant to go to the university level with it due to concerns about damag-ing the student’s perm anent record. Eventually the professor decided togive the student zeros for all of the library assignments, resulting in zerosfor six assignments comprising 15 percent of the final grade. While the




punishment was severe in the context of the class, it was never reported atthe university level, leading one to question whether statistics on academicdishonesty must be treated as merely the tip of the iceberg, with somecases never being reported. What does lead to a case actually getting tothe university? Maramark and Maline (1993) report from a survey of fac-ulty that “the nature and severity of the offense dictated how each casewould be handled” ( p. 6).

Another factor that can dissuade faculty from pursuing a charge ofacademic dishonesty is the time requirements. This is especially true ifthe university judicial system is time-consuming a nd /o r complicated.

Cheryl Ruggiero (n.d .-a) , an English professor a t Virginia Tech, reportedthat two students , because they had plagiarized papers in her class, “stoleabout 15 hours of my time from my othe r students” (paragraph 6). JoeKerkvliet, an associate professor of economics at Oregon State University,found in a self-report survey that 500 students in twelve classes reportedcheating anywhere from .002 percent in one class to 35 percent in an-other class (Schneider, 1999, p. A9 . Multiply 7 . 5 hours to pursue an aca-demic dishonesty charge times 35 percent of a class and it is clear whysome professors choose to no t recognize or pursue plagiarism. Schneider

(1999) found in talking to professors that most thought that theiruniversity’s udicial system was “laborious, even labyrinthine” (p. A8). CraigThompson (1998), who left academic teaching after a dozen years, saidthat he had better things to d o than make trouble for himself, especiallysince the punishment for plagiarism was “small” p. 49).

WHAT CAN WE Do?The librarian’s role on campus has been somewhat limited in the

past. Access to students has been through point-of-use aides, reference

interviews, an d instructional classes. Librarians must now actively seek outnew roles on campus that will create open and regular dialogues withstudents about information an d its ethical use. Carla Stoffle, dean of Li-braries a t the University of Arizona, during he r talk as featu red speaker atthe Library Orientation an d Exchange (LOEX) 2000 conference, encour-aged librarians to partner with faculty in curriculum development as aneducational role, integrating information literacy directly into the class.Trends toward student-centered learning have opened up many opportu-nities. Freshmen seminars an d learning communities, to note only two,

offer librarians the chance to get to know students on a personal level an dto exchange ideas while on common ground . These shared experiencescan create a pathway toward making students comfortable with askingquestions an d seeking answers from their librarians.

Inform ing Faculty-Paper Mills, Software, and the InternetWith initiatives that increase the amount of writing throughout the



AUER AN D KRUPAR/MOU SE CLICK PLAGIARISM 425

curriculum, more faculty need to be concerned about whether their stu-dents are plagiarizing. Composition and English faculty may already be awareof paper mills and software that detects possible plagiarism, but the major-ity of faculty are probably unaware that such sites and software exist. Librar-ians with liaison responsibilities o r those who have good rapport with aca-demic departments should begin a dialogue with faculty about the extentto which students plagiarize in their classes and provide information aboutWeb sites and software. This may help the faculty battle the problem. Basingerand McCollum (1997) discuss the work of Anthony Krier, a librarian fromFranklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, who has maintained a Web-

based list of paper mills. His compiled list of paper mills is now available tomembers of the Center for Academic Integrity (http:/ /www.academicintegrity.org) . These authors were unable to confirm this due tothe material being placed in the members-only section. William McHenry’s(1998) Web site offers another very useful comparison table of paper millsfor those who wish to investigate possible incidents of plagiarism.

Once plagiarism is suspected, the librarian can help the professorthrough both traditional and technology-oriented methods. Before theadvent of software and Inte rnet checking methods, professors ende d up

looking through sources and trying to find the original material. Early inthe career of one of the authors, she helped a professor check throughliterary criticism sources such as the Contemporary Literary Criticism andTwentieth Century Literary Criticism, looking for material that seemedout of place in a student’s paper, both by concept and vocabulary. Thismethod was very time consuming an d carried limited promise of success.Today, there are myriad software packages an d Inte rnet sites available to aprofessor who suspects plagiarism especially if the professor’s studentssubmit papers electronically.

Preventing plagiarism before it happens is better than detecting itafter the event. Librarians, as research and information literacy experts,should help faculty examine their existing or future assignments to deter-mine the ease with which students could plagiarize. To make plagiarismdifficult, faculty should consider “requiring topic proposals, idea outlines,multiple drafts, interim working bibliographies and photocopies of sources”(Hinchliffe, 1998, paragraph 4). This has the added benefit of reducingthe likelihood that a student would plagiarize based o n lack of time, sincethe requirement to regularly submit the steps displaying progress on a

paper leads to less frantic time pressure. Requiring working bibliographieswith annotations of what the students have learned from each source canalso provide an opportunity to teach students how to differentiate betweentheir own ideas an d ideas that they have gleaned from their sources (Miller,2000, p. 420).

Renard (1999/2000) also offers faculty several suggestions for pre-venting plagiarism. A teacher should get a sample of in-class writing at the



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beginning of the term. This gives a basis for comparison to see if a laterpaper matches the original sample based on tone an d level of ability. Hav-ing the original essay done in class precludes plagiarism on the compari-son essay and gives a base line for comparison. Another suggestion is tomake writing assignments more interesting and thus less likely to be easilyavailable on free or cheap paper mills. Tom Rocklin, a professor at theUniversity of Iowa, says that when teachers give broad general-knowledgepapers, they are unwittingly encouraging students to cheat (Zack, 1998,p. B11). Papers that are mere recitation or recounting of information arethe most vulnerable for cheating, not only because these types of papers

are the most available from paper mills, but also because students havethe least amount of themselves invested in the paper. When personal con-nections to a topic or personal experiences are expected, students aremore likely to engage in higher-level thinking skills (Renard, 1999/2000,p. 41). A professor at the University of Maryland has changed the writingassignments in one class, requiring more personal writing, due to the risein Internet-related cheating. He knows that Internet-related cheating hap-pens since he has caught students trying to use material from the Internet(Lemke, 1999, paragraph 8) . While a student can still commission a paper

written o n a more inventive topic, it is usually much more expensive thana more generic one, hopefully creating a fiscal barrier to plagiarism.

One of the most basic and overlooked methods of preventing plagia-rism is to talk to the students about it, both defining it and what theprofessor’s policies are concerning it (Hinchliffe, 1998, paragraph 4).Making students aware that professors are concerned an d are looking forplagiarism can discourage at least the casual incidents of the quick cut-and-paste type of plagiarism. What arguments can be used to persuadestudents not to plagiarize? Kroll (1988) studied students’ views on plagia-

rism and found that the majority of student comments fell into three cat-egories. Forty-seven percent of students expressed the belief that they havea responsibility to themselves no t to plagiarize “either because plagiarisminvolves cheating oneself (usually out of learning or improving as a writer),or because it violates the duty to do one’s own work (a nd thus use one’sown mind or creative capacity”) (p . 211) . Fairness was cited by 46 percentof students as a reason for not plagiarizing; the students cited the injus-tice of not giving credit where it is du e or the giving of credit to those whodo not deserve it (Kroll, 1988, p. 212). Lastly, 36 percent of studentsequated plagiarism with theft of property, an illegal act understood by allstudents (Kroll, 1988, p. 213).

InstructionInstructional sessions would seem the perfect method for providing

students with information about how to appropriately use Web pages andfull-text articles in their research. Librarians have an ethical obligation to



428 LIBRARY TRENDS/ WINTER 2001

teach bibliographic citation methods and strategies for how to best avoidplagiarism, especially of Int erne t sources (Gresham, 1996; Malone &Videon, 1997). However, every librarian who does instruction has facedthe dilemma of deciding what to include in his or her instructional ses-sions. Since information literacy is seldom integrated into the curricu-lum, most of us are grateful for even a fifty-minute class where we canintroduce the bare essentials of the research method. At Virginia Tech,the library’s representative to the Undergraduate Honor System appealedto librarians who do instruction sessions to cover plagiarism more in theirsessions, a request prompted by a sharp increase in honor code violations(see Figure 2 ) .

We argue here that plagiarism should be considered a vital topic forevery class. It takes only a few minutes to introduce the concept and con-sequences of plagiarism and to point ou t to students where citation styleguides can be found . Librarians should also indicate the questionable qual-ity and age of most papers available on the Internet, and that studentscould get into trouble for plagiarizing, submitting a poorly written paper,or both (Targett, 1997; McHenry, 1998). It is also helpful to suggest tostudents that they start the research process early, choose a topic that

truly interests them, consciously avoid selecting materials solely based onfull-text electronic availability rather than quality of material, an d keep arecord of their citations to assist with the creation of their bibliographies.

Those librarians with good collaborative relationships with facultymight establish additional contact with students through a second classperiod, a brief question-and-answer session in the regular classroom, acourse listserv, or with a course chat room. Perhaps the best method in-volves working with the professor directly. Working directly with profes-sors to integrate a discussion of plagiarism into the instructional session

will help the faculty integrate the topic into their classes as well as offeringan opportunity to p resent information about designing assignments in away that will combat plagiarism.

Web-based instruction shows great potential for actively engaging stu-dents in learning how to avoid plagiarism and how to create citations.Instead of reinventing the wheel, librarians should seek permission to usetutorials already in existence or form partnerships on campus to createtheir own. Successful integration of such a tutorial into the curriculumdepends upon nurturing relationships with faculty an d demonstrating the

widespread need for it to administrators through statistics an d faculty tes-timonials.

HandoutsThe purpose of any instructional class or reference interview is to

point students to information they can either find on their own or takewith them. The proliferation of the World Wide Web and other electronic



AUER AN D KRUPAR/MO USE CLICK PLAGIARISM 429

resources seems to be contributing to declining numbers of questions beingasked at reference desks. According to calculations based on data fromthe Association of Research Libraries ARL) Web site, reference transac-tions for eighty-three of its member libraries have decreased by approxi-mately 18 percent between 1996 and 1999 (Association of Research Li-braries, 1998-99, table 1). For this reason alone, print and online guidesneed to be readily available for students to find information on the ir own.Therefore, librarians need to provide students and faculty alike with in-formation , in various formats, abou t citing on line information. Both printhandouts and Web pages can give students information about how to usevarious citation styles and where to find more information about this is-sue. Handouts are particularly useful since they can be used in any settingand students can write notes directly on them for future reference. Webpages are useful for pointing to ex ternal Web-based style guides. Such a“Webliography” might include Nancy Crane and Xia Li’s authoritative Web-based guide “Bibliographic Formats for Citing Electronic Information”(http://www.uvm.edu/%7encrance/estyles).

Library Web pages an d handouts are perfect for handling questionsat the reference desk since they are easy to poin t to o r distribute at the

moment of need. Since initial contact at the desk usually leads to morequestions, librarians can raise students’ awareness of the need to cite in-formation by mentioning it early o n an d by offering ready-reference ma-terials and referrals to Web sites, help pages, or the on campus writingcenters.

CONCLUSIONAs libraries increase the number of full-text resources such as elec-

tronic journals, Web sites, and periodical databases (e.g., InfoTrac), so

does the need to educate users about the ethical use of information. Infact, this ties in nicely with the Association of College and Research Li-braries’ (ACRL) Information Literacy standards that were approved atthe American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Conference 2000. Thisdocument spells out particular student outcomes that universities and theirlibraries should strive toward in their curriculum. The last section dealsspecifically with the difficulties that students have in understanding issuesrelated to plagiarism, copyright, and the use of citation styles (“Informa-tion Literacy,” 2000). University administrators are slowly recognizing the

need to ensure tha t their graduates are not only competent users of tech-nology but also able to find and use information. Therefore , ou r responsi-bility always has involved, and will always involve, increasing our users’awareness of the ethical and legal implications of using information.

In order to better educate o ur users, we must first be aware and in-formed ourselves. Campus resources are valuable sources of informationin this area since they reflect how other units o n campus are app roaching



430 LIBRARY TREND S/WIN TER 2001

these issues. A search on the Internet can identify other resources thatmight expand or improve one's understanding of the definitions and situ-ations surrounding plagiarism. A cursory search on AltaVista of universitywriting centers and plagiarism retrieved 146 results, many of them directlyrelated to the topic. It is also useful to discover the num ber of plagiarismcases reported on campus to capture an accurate picture of how prevalent(o r how underreported) acts of plagiarism are on campus. This informa-tion can then be used to begin a dialogue with faculty. Librarians shouldwork with faculty in not only redesigning research assignments, but alsowork with them to re-examine their curriculum in or de r to identify pointsand places where discussion or information about plagiarism should bediscussed with students. Librarians should supply faculty with helpful point-ers to paper mills, detection softwar?, an d Inte rne t search strategies thatfaculty can use to investigate plagiarism when a case is suspected.

I t is obvious that students are in great need of guidance on how to useinformation ethically and legally. Instructional sessions with librariansshould include direct information abou t plagiarism an d its consequencesalong with practical steps students can take to avoid the risk of plagiarismin their research assignments.

To predict the fu ture would be risky at best. Currently there is some-what of a mish-mash without much guidance on what o r how to cite Webinformation, with different style manuals gathering different information,no t all of which is available. Even the sites that a re updates of the usualcitation guides, such as M A are not especially helpful. However, it is hopedthat the future will see the creation of consistency among style manuals,particularly in regard to citing Internet material.

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