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PLAGIARISMMarianne Talbot

Imperial College International Students’ Orientation Workshop

27th September 2013

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Who can tell me what plagiarism is?

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ICL’s definition of ‘plagiarism’ is on your handout:

 

“the presentation of another person's thoughts , words or images and diagrams as though they were your own”  

(From Academic Integrity, Imperial College London)

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On the next slide is an extract from an essay.

Do you think this student is presenting another person’s thoughts or words as his own?

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“During the last 60 years the development of effective and safe drugs to deal with bacterial infections has revolutionised medical treatment, and the morbidity and mortality from microbial disease have been dramatically reduced.”

Rang H P, Dale M and Ritter J M (1999) Pharmacology, 4th edition.pp.657. Edinburgh, UK:

Churchill Livingstone.

Student one:

The development of safe and effective drugs to deal with bacterial infections has dramatically reduced the death rate arising from microbial diseases.

Bibliography: Rang et al., 1999

This exercise was taken from The Journal of Biological Education (2003) 37 (3) Wilmott, J.R & Harrison, T.M., Department of Biochemistry, University of Leicester

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The student is guilty of plagiarism.

Although they don’t quote directly from the source, and they do include the author in the bibliography, they have taken their words directly from a source they didn’t name, merely changing them a bit as they go along.

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Did you know you can plagiarize yourself?

• republishing the same paper that is published elsewhere without notifying the reader nor publisher of the journal

• reusing portions of a previously written (published or unpublished but assessed text)

Roig, Miguel. (2006). Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing. Retrieved from

http://facpub.stjohns.edu/~roigm/plagiarism.doc

Here is a guide on self-plagiarism and how to avoid it: http://www.ithenticate.com/plagiarism-checker-blog/bid/65061/What-Is-Self-Plagiarism-and-How-to-Avoid-It

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It is not always easy to tell whether one is guilty of plagiarism or not

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For some of you this will be very familiar

For others it may be new

Let me tell you why I have been asked to address you on plagiarism

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When I was an undergraduate very little was said about plagiarism

We didn’t know much about what it was

We weren’t told anything about how to avoid it

I don’t remember anyone having been caught doing it (which doesn’t mean no-one was doing it)

Many of my undergraduate essays don’t have bibliographies and they are very sparsely referenced.

This continued to be the case for many years

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Recently the spotlight has been turned on plagiarism because:

it has become much easier to plagiarise the work of others

it has become much easier to detect plagiarism

I’m sure you can tell me why….?

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In 2011 The Daily Telegraph conducted a survey at 80 UK universities.

They discovered that 17,000 incidents of ‘cheating’ had been recorded (mostly cases of plagiarism)

This represented an increase of 50% over the previous four years (2007-2011).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8363345/The-cheating-epidemic-at-Britains-universities.html

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Here are some comments made by working scientists whose papers, having been found to be plagiarised, have been retracted by journals: 

"I would like to offer my apology to the authors of the original paper for not seeking the permission for using some part of their paper. I was not aware of the fact I am required to take such permission."

"I know my careless mistake resulted in a severe ethical issue. I am really disappointed with myself as a researcher."

"There are probably only 'x' amount of word combinations that could lead to 'y' amount of statements.... I have no idea why the pieces are similar, except that I am sure I do not have a good enough memory-and it is certainly not photographic-to have allowed me to have 'copied' his piece.... I did in fact review [the earlier article] for whatever journal it was published in."

"It was a joke, a bad game, an unconscious bet between friends, 10 years ago that such things ... happened. I deeply regret,“

In Garner et al, Nature 451, 397-399 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451397a; Published online 23 January 2008

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Turnitin and other forms of plagiarism detection software have make the detection of plagiarism FAR easier than it once was

Where once it was easily possible to get away with plagiarising the work of others this is no longer the case

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ICL uses turnitin widely though every department and/or Faculty uses it differently.

Ideally it should be used as a learning tool; by means of it you can learn how to reference properly

Some departments spot check students’ work

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It is now so easy to detect plagiarism that some people are doing it for fun. Those who might reasonably have thought they had got away with it are finding it is catching up with them:

On 9th February 2013 the 57 year old German Education Minister, Annette Schavan, resigned having had her doctorate revoked by the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf

Schavan is the latest in a string of high-powered German politicians who have been found to be guilty of plagiarism since Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned as German Defence Minister after admitting that he copied parts of his doctorate.

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But perhaps the saddest cases are existing students who are being caught up in the new-found zeal with which plagiarists are being sought:

30 students at Victoria's Deakin University have been found guilty of plagiarism and nine have been expelled (October 06, 2012 The Australian)

125 Harvard students (half the class) were called before a subcommittee of the Harvard College Administrative Board on suspicion of plagiarism in a final exam. 60 of them were forced to withdraw (February 19th 2013 The Telegraph)

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At ICL the penalties for plagiarism are:

a mark of zero for the assessment in which the offence occurred

a mark of zero for all the assessments in that year

exclusion from all future examinations of the University (i.e. expulsion from the University).

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10 types of plagiarism ordered from most to least severe:

  CLONE: The act of submitting another’s work, word-for-word, as one’s own.

CTRL-C: Written work containing significant portions of text from a single source without alterations.

FIND–REPLACE: The act of changing key words and phrases but retaining the essential content of the source in a paper.

REMIX: The act of paraphrasing from other sources and making the content fit together seamlessly.

  RECYCLE: Self-plagiarism: the act of borrowing generously from one’s own previous work without citation;

  HYBRID: The act of combining perfectly cited sources with copied passages—without citation—in one

paper.

  MASHUP: A paper that represents a mix of copied material from several different sources without proper

citation.

  404 ERROR: A written piece that includes citations to non-existent or inaccurate information about sources

  AGGREGATOR: a paper including proper citation, but almost no original work.

  RE-TWEET: a paper including proper citation, but relying too closely on the text’s original wording and/or

structure. Turnitin White Paper: The Plagiarism Spectrum:

http://pages.turnitin.com/rs/iparadigms/images/Turnitin_WhitePaper_PlagiarismSpectrum.pdf

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We have looked at some of the ramifications of plagiarism for those caught plagiarising

But WHY do people plagiarise others’ work?

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The best way to avoid charges of plagiarism is to avoid plagiarism!

This involves:

knowing what plagiarism is (Excellent plagiarism course from Cardiff University: https://ilrb.cf.ac.uk/plagiarism/tutorial/index.html and another from Penn State in the USA:

http://tlt.psu.edu/plagiarism/ ;

knowing why plagiarism must be avoided (see section four in this piece from Oklahoma

state University: http://integrity.ou.edu/files/nine_things_you_should_know.pdf );

planning ahead (allow enough time to plan and write up your work);

getting into good note-taking habits (when doing research keep a record of everything you read, including author, title, publication place and date. If you are reading online material, keep a note of the author,

title, date (if there is one), URL, and the date that you viewed the page);

making use of decent citation software (an excellent article on ‘accidental’ plagiarism at the end of which are lots of references to free citation software: http://

thejournal.com/Articles/2011/01/25/The-Accidental-Plagiarists.aspx?Page=3#2CWJZ2euVExE2v32.99)

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Avoiding plagiarism is not sufficient for avoiding charges of plagiarism – beware free plagiarism detection software

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In becoming a university student you committed yourself to join the community of scholars…

…I hope this session has helped you with one of the most important skills of scholarship….

…properly acknowledging the work of others