Turnitin will be adding 300,000 dissertations and theses published from 2008 to the present into its plagiarism comparison database. The new material comes from the Dissertations & Theses Database, a Web-based information reference from ProQuest.
From Campus Technology
iParadigms, the leader in plagiarism prevention software, today announced a new study titled "The Ethics of Self-Plagiarism," an area of growing concern in the world of scholarly research. This study offers a definition of self-plagiarism and how the reuse and repurposing of research by its originator can run afoul of copyright guidelines and fair use provisions.
To download this free white paper, visit: http://www.ithenticate.com/self-plagiarism-free-white-paper.
"Self-plagiarism is one of the most potentially dangerous forms of misconduct in scholarly research due to the lack of understanding of the ethics involved in repurposing one's own work," said Robert Creutz, general manager of iThenticate, iParadigms' plagiarism checking software for scholarly publishers and researchers. "This white paper offers a clear definition of self-plagiarism and how authors and publishers can avoid this issue and the costly retractions associated it."... [More]
From PRNewswire.com
By Rob Jenkins, Chronicle of Higher Education
Plagiarism is making us crazy. No, the mere thought of plagiarism is making us crazy. Collectively, as a professoriate, we're obsessed with it.
Consider "The Shadow Scholar," an anonymous confessional by a man who purportedly produces student papers on demand. Originally published in November of 2010, it remains one of the most-viewed articles on The Chronicle's Web site and has received, to date, more than 600 comments. More recently, we all read with fascination The Chronicle's account of Panagiotis Ipeirotis, a professor who got into hot water at New York University for blogging about the hordes of alleged cheaters in his courses. That piece, too, was among the site's most popular.
All of that preoccupation with plagiarism does little to help us answer the fundamental question: What can we as individual faculty members do about it?
My approach to student plagiarism over the course of my 26-year teaching career has been simple but, I believe, effective. I use strategies well known to most experienced professors, with a few twists of my own. Please note that what I'm about to describe is strictly my personal approach and does not reflect the official policies of my college (although I don't believe it conflicts with those policies, either)... [Read more]
Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College. He blogs at www.nccforum.org and writes monthly for our community-college column. His book, "Building a Career in America's Community Colleges," has just been published by the American Association of Community Colleges and the Community College Press.
This new video from the University of Bergen is the best quality and most entertaining video I’ve seen done on the topic of plagiarism.
http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2010/best-new-plagiarism-video/From iLibrarian
Prof. Artal, I am a post-doc in the UK. Although I am working now in vision research, I actually did my PhD in a different area and in a different country. I still try to be aware of the new papers appearing in my former research area and of course I like to see how my papers are used, and from time to time cited. Last week, I was having a look of a new paper in a journal (not quite prestigious, but with reasonable reputation in the field) and… I was initially surprised and later devastated to see that in that article several full paragraphs looked too familiar to me… in fact, those paragraphs were identical to those in one of my own papers. The experiments and results… again nearly identical and my paper not even cited. Is anything I can do? Brenda, Birmingham, UK.
Brenda, this is a radical example of plagiarism! I am sure most readers know the definition:
Plagiarism: "direct use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work”
Obviously, the journal that published that paper made a significant mistake, but it is true that often it can be difficult to detect these papers. At least, you should write the editor of both journals informing on the situation. Other than that… well you perhaps can feel flattered to know that some people in the other corner of the world (or perhaps not far from your office!) spend their time just duplicating what you did (without proper credit)!
This is a recurrent and “classic” topic in science and scientist’s ethics and behavior. As in any other life activity, some persons want to make progress quickly (too quick) and they are ready to do anything, even using other’s work. This is obviously unethical and also in some cases can be very risky (in fact when somebody is doing that is ruining the whole career and future). One simple case of plagiarism is to literally copy a previous paper (word by word in some parts) as in Brenda's case. In other situations, more elaborated approaches can be more difficult to discover. In last month editorial, the journal Nature Photonics (http://www.nature.com/nphoton/index.html) nicely touched this issue from different aspects.
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I think, yes! First, as authors, especially those young ones, my recommendation is to completely avoid copy-paste from other papers into your manuscripts, even in a draft format. Many journals are using now specialized software to track papers by comparing with a database of those previously published. If you are so naive to have your own research, but you try to complete your paper with some paragraphs from other papers... you can be in serious troubles, so completely avoid that. Of course, I am assuming that you properly cite (see a previous post on citation code, http://pabloartal.blogspot.com/2008/10/to-be-cited-or-not-to-be-cited.html ) and that you only decide to write a paper based in your independent research and results.
Avoiding Plagiarism
It's in the news again. Plagiarism. A notable Midwestern university has discovered that plagiarism has been "rampant" in one of its graduate departments for twenty years. Over several months, it has dealt comprehensively with the situation, recommending disciplinary action for past offenses and remedies to prevent future occurrences...
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