Tackling the plague of plagiarism

Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V is one of the simplest keystroke operations you can perform on a PC. (For readers of the blog who are Mac people, you will also agree that apple-C apple-V is equally straightforward). And yet that two-sequence action is causing a huge amount of concern in educational establishments across the world writes Peter Williams.

Plagiarism has become a plague and one which the teaching profession seems powerless to control. One blog by a Canadian teacher asked what could be done to try to curb the way that students appeared to think that writing an essay was no more than an exercise in cut and paste. The answer according to one correspondent was to assign a 0 for the work and hand out a detention. A few detentions, it was claimed, soon brought the class to realise that passing off other people’s work as your own is nothing more than cheating. Of course, the big headache is to distinguish between the deliberate cheat and those who misunderstand or misuse academic conventions.

News from Germany this week added a new twist to the debate over plagiarism. In an apparently carefully worded statement the Proteomics editor-in-chief and publisher Wiley-VCH announced that following an agreement with the authors they had decided to retract an article from online journal Proteomics. The article would now no longer appear in print. The announcement stated: “The article has been retracted because it contains apparently plagiarised passages from several previously published articles.”
IWR will be covering this news in more detail in its March edition.

It has to be considered good news that this incident has been brought out into the open and it seems that all of the parties concerned have attempted to deal with the issue in an open and transparent way. But what does this incident tell us? Is this a one-off or is it the tip of an iceberg? How should information professionals react to incidents of apparent plagiarism that they encounter? This is a difficult tightrope that must be walked. But some help is at hand. In 2005 JISC produced a briefing paper on how to deter, detect and deal with student plagiarism. All institutions now need policies in place to deal with this problem. Not to have such procedures is just poor management.