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Electronic
Plagiarism > Faculty Resources
> Identify Plagiarism
Online Resources for
Faculty
Identifying Plagiarism |
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Most common signs of plagiarized work
What to do when you suspect a paper has been plagiarized?
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Most Common Signs
of Plagiarized Work |
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Papers written in a
more sophisticated way that the student's previous work
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Text format uncommon
for regular word processing documents (i.e., similar to print out
of web pages).
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Paper seems to be
made of independent pieces, some with different writing styles.
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Different citation
styles in the same paper.
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The absence of
current references and/or the presence of dead links. Both
indicate what might be a very old document.
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What to Do When You Suspect a Paper Has Been Plagiarized? |
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Although no magic recipe to identify cases of plagiarism exists,
some strategies might help. If you get a paper you suspect was
plagiarized:
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Talk to
the writer of the paper. Ask about the procedure s/he used during
the research process, where the sources were found and how, etc.
Ask the student to clarify any point you believe was too advanced
for him/her.
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Compare the paper
with those handed in by students of previous semesters;
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Use search engines to
compare the suspected paper with material on the Web;
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Use a plagiarism
detection service to compare the suspected paper with the Internet
material and/or the company's database;
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Use a "cloze test":
Select part of the paper and delete every fifth word of the text.
Then ask the writer of the paper to replace the missing words.
The student might not be the author of the text if s/he cannot
fill in over 80% of the words. This method is used by the
Glatt plagiarism
services.
Important: Note
that to apply the suggestions above instructors will need to have
access to the electronic versions of the papers. Thus, a good
practice is always to require students to hand in both
a hard copy and an electronic version of their papers.
The above strategies
for
detecting plagiarism are detailed in the page,
Anti-Plagiarism Tools, in this site.
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External Resources |
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For much more information on identifying
plagiarism, check the following selected web pages:
There are many
strategies to identify plagiarized work and instructors should be
familiar with them. However, more important than finding
plagiarism is preventing it from happening.
To learn strategies for
preventing plagiarism, go to the page
Preventing Plagiarism in this site.
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About Plagiarism |
Preventing Plagiarism |
Sources of Plagiarism |
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