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How to discover
plagiarism
Mohammad Bagher Rokni* Ph.D
Merriam-Webster Online
Dictionary defines plagiarism as follows:
To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own, To
use (another’s production) without crediting the source, To commit
literary theft and to present as new and original an idea or product
derived from an existing source.
Plagiarism is the use of others’ published and unpublished ideas or
words (or other intellectual property) without attribution or
permission, and presenting them as new and original rather than derived
from an existing source. The intent and effect of plagiarism is to
mislead the reader as to the contributions of the plagiarizer. This
applies whether the ideas or words are taken from abstracts, research
grant applications, Institutional Review Board applications, or
unpublished or published manuscripts in any publication format (print or
electronic).
How to detect
plagiarism
Taking into consideration that
the best person intending to go for plagiarism is the writer
him/herself, the preeminent mode is enquiring from the writer in the
first place about his motives for plagiarism. Our experience frequently
shows that a lot of writers do plagiarize merely to improve their
writing quality, especially in non- English speaking countries. As Pan
Aihua, after being accused of plagiarism, said, “Some Chinese scientists
think that they can not compete equally in Western journals because of a
problem with English, so they copy what others have done and then fill
in what is new. They do not feel this is unethical as long as the
scientific work is original”. I realize this point to be applicable to
other similar countries. In my observations some writers select a paper
and base their article frame on it, stating that the core data is theirs
and simply the use of superior English style to elevate the chance of
acceptance of their papers besides improving the text quality. Most of
them are not familiar with the scope of plagiarism and do it
unintentionally. Thus it is believed that we should enquire from the
writer first and the chance to detect plagiarism in this way is very
high.
Strategies of
detection of Plagiarism
However, how about cases that
intentionally do plagiarize and consciously repeat it as auto-plagiarism
or hetero-plagiarism over and over again? There are some strategies
being considered in this regard which are helpful in detection. These
include:
• Sudden changes in audience, tone, vocabulary, sentence structure,
level of sophistication, degree of depth or understanding of topic;
• Writing that seems far more sophisticated than that you normally see
or expect in writers of the same level; when you look at the
Introduction it seems that it is written by Shakespeare himself but when
you reach the Result or Discussion you’ll be depressed and wonder if it
is written by a child. As a matter of fact the Discussion section is the
beat portion of the article to enquire of probable plagiarism because
the writer has to interpret her/him findings and compare them with
others data. So the writer inevitably must use of his/her style of
writing there.
• Font of paper suddenly changes (suggests copy/pasting);
• Inconsistencies in citation format or usage;
• Complete lack of citations, especially for complex material/ideas;
• Last minute change of paper topic or research focus;
• Anomalies of style. Is the prose style remarkable? Are there two-page
paragraphs that remind you of a nineteenth-century encyclopedia? Is
there ornate rhetorical structure? Does the introduction get in its own
way and stumble around, only to give way to glowing, flowing discourse?
Is there a mixture of British and American punctuation or spelling, with
consistent usage within large sections?
• “Blunders of the clueless,” since it includes obvious indicators of
copying. Reported in the past have been labels left at the end of
papers (“Thank you for using this web site”).
• Unusual formatting. Strange margins, skewed tables, lines broken in
half, mixed subhead styles and other formatting anomalies may indicate a
hasty copy and paste job.
Use a plagiarism
detector via Internet
• Because most of the web sites
embrace different data in their sites, even with no permission of the
owner, it is possible to detect the source of plagiarism in just one
click. But it must be considered that no search engine independently
covers more than one third of visible Web, so try more than one search
engine to be sure of the output. Fortunately nearly all biomedical
Journals are covered by free visible Web and a small portion including
magazines, newspapers, reference works, and encyclopedias, are
categorized as invisible free Web.
Some of these search engines are as follows:
* http://www.plagiarism.org
Online service that checks submitted student papers against a large
database and provides reports of results. This website, as stated by
the owners is capable to discover the cases of plagiarism even if up to
50% of the sentences are altered. The mechanism by which this service is
presented is using some curves and determining the situation of the
examined paper above or below the plagiarism threshold. Also monitors
term paper mills.
* http://www.m4-software.com
* http://www.canexus.com/eve/
Inexpensive software agent that searches the Web to compare a
suspect paper with Internet content.
* http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/index.shtml (eTBlast)
The last website is especially designed to help the reviewers in
detecting the plagiarism and is free of charge at the moment. This
website according the sponsors searches in PubMed databases and presents
Medline abstracts. To start the enquiring some sections of the article
or whole of it, provided that has been changed to text format, is
inserted into special box and clicking the specific bottom it starts to
search and after about two minutes presents all related Medline
abstract, i.e., something similar to “ Related paper” in PubMed. Of
course, it gives also a kind of Zscore form top to below and the higher
the Zscore the higher the probability of plagiarism. But the reviewers
must be careful in interpreting the results because this program merely
demonstrates the similar words and highlights them, so even when it
declares that more than 80% of the submitted text is similar to another
text, it does not imply that this is a case of plagiarism. Moreover this
site is just searching in PubMed database, so if the source of
plagiarism is somewhere except PubMed another method must be examined.
Obviously, PubMed just covers about 5000 Journals and not all of them.
As stated earlier some other website and specially Googlscholar. Com is
very efficient in this regard.
* turnitin.com
This is a commercial database, which according to its owner is
especially useful for academic cheatings. Recognized worldwide as the
standard in online plagiarism prevention, Turnitin helps educators and
students take full advantage of the internet’s educational potential.
Other Search Sites
Some search sites, which can
assiste in this regard, are as follows:
* www.google.com
* www.dogpile.com
* www.yahoo.com
* www.altavisa.com
* www.webcrawler.com
* www.excite.com
* http://www.northernlight.com/
* http://www.fastsearch.com/
Paid databases over
the Web
Even some commercial database
sell ready papers in many aspects and have a look at them now and then
lends a hand to the reviewer and Editor to boost the chance of finding
plagiarism. Some of such URLs are listed here:
* www.collegetermpapers.com
* www.termpapers-on-file.com
* www.papersinn.com
* www.acceptedpapers.com
* www.term-paper.net
* www.termpapersites.com
* www.papersbank.com
* www.007termpapers.com
* www.instantpapers.com
*
http://www.coastal.edu/library/mills2.htm
References
1. CSE’s White Paper on
Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications Editorial Policy
Committee (2005–2006), Council of Science Editors
www.CouncilScienceEditors.org
2.
http://www.plagiarism.org/technology2.html
3.
http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/plagiarism/
4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
5.
http://www.turnitin.com/static/plagiarism.html
6.
http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/
7.
http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml
* Department of
Medical Parasitology and Mycology,
School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran
Associate and Copy Editor of : Iranian Journal of Public Health.
Associate and Copy Editor of “Iranian Journal of Parasitology”, Tehran,
Iran
P.O.Box: 14155-6446, Tehran, Iran
E mail: mbrokni@gmail.com
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