Academic Dishonesty

Abundant Cheating

Academic Dishonesty

Definitions of Academic Dishonesty

Legal Aspects of Academic Dishonesty

Internet Research Ethics

Plagiarism

"Plagiarism has never been easier than it is today. Before the Internet, cheating was labor-intensive and obvious. Potential plagiarists had to find appropriate works from a limited pool of resources, usually a nearby library, and copy them by hand. Since these resources were almost always professionally written, the risk of detection was very high.
The Internet now makes it easy to find thousands of relevant sources in seconds, and in the space of a short time plagiarists can find, copy, and paste together a term paper, article, or even a book. Because the material online is produced by writers of varying levels of quality and professionalism, it is often difficult or impossible for educators and editors to identify plagiarism.

Even when an instructor or editor does suspect plagiarism, the sheer size of the Internet seems to work in the plagiarist's favor. Search engines can be useful for tracking down suspect passages, but even they have their limitations, given the number, variety, and password-protected nature of many websites. Even where search engines do prove useful, manually searching the Internet for matches of hundreds of papers or articles can be a formidable task.

Additionally, the seemingly "public" nature of online content blurs the distinction between publicly and privately owned information. Electronic resources, by nature easily reproducible, are not perceived as "intellectual property" in the same way that their material counterparts are. Just as peer-to-peer file sharing programs have made it easy to trade copyrighted music files most people would never think to steal in physical form, the Internet makes plagiarism easy for students and writers who might have thought twice about copying from a book or published article.

Perhaps the greatest resources for would-be plagiarists in the educational world are the hundreds of online paper mills that exist solely for the purpose of providing students with quick-fix homework and term-paper solutions. Many of these services contain hundreds of thousands of papers on a wide variety of topics, and some even offer customized papers for an additional fee. The fact that many of these sites have become profitable ventures (complete with paid advertising!) only attests to the unfortunate truth that plagiarism has become a booming industry.

Turnitin and iThenticate offer plagiarism detection services that address this growing problem of intellectual property theft and dishonesty. Organizations around the world have found that an effective plagiarism detection service when combined with plagiarism education serves as an enormously effective deterrent to digital plagiarism."

Research Resources

Turnitin

ithenticate

Ethical Guidelines for Online Research