Detecting Electronic Plagiarism for Suffolk University Faculty

Electronic information resources have made it easier for students to conduct research. The Sawyer Library subscribes to dozens of databases with literally millions of articles in full text. Students can also use search engines on the World Wide Web to find completed papers from millions of Internet sites. It has become easy to manage blocks of text using download, copy and paste commands through the computer workstation’s operating system (Windows or Mac). To further complicate matters, there are almost one hundred known paper mills on the Internet for students willing to pay for completed papers.

Service for Suffolk University Faculty to Help Detect Plagiarism

CAS Academic Computing has acquired Turnitin (http://www.turnitin.com), a software program that scans student papers for incidences of plagiarism. According to Turnitin’s documentation:

We prevent and detect plagiarism by comparing submitted papers to billions of pages of content located on the Internet and our proprietary databases. The results of our comparisons are compiled, one for each paper submitted, in custom "Originality Reports." These reports are sent to participating educators, who access the results by logging into their Turnitin account(s).

For more information on this program, please visit Turnitin or contact CAS Academic Computing.

Guides

• Suffolk University Professor Gerry Richman in the English Department has prepared an excellent, Web-accessible guide entitled "Detecting Electronic Plagiarism."
• Ronald B. Standler, Ph.D., former Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University and now a Massachusetts lawyer has written Plagiarism in Colleges in USA, an essay discussing plagiarism from a legal perspective for students as well as faculty.

The Sawyer Library’s Subscription Databases

Plagiarism is not necessarily content from Internet sites; it is just as easy to plagiarize using the millions of articles available through the thousands of full-text journals accessible and available through the databases licensed by the Sawyer Library.

It is possible to detect plagiarism involving the library’s subscription databases:

Using an Internet Search Engine for Detecting Plagiarism

Faculty members can use an Internet search engine to help find copied works. Use a "search engine" (such as Google) rather than a "search directory" (such as Yahoo!) because a search engine indexes almost every word at a web site for its database, whereas a search directory categorizes an entire site into subject areas and individual words may or may not be indexed.

How to:

it is recommended you look for a unique four or five word exact phrase as it appears in the paper

type the phrase into the search engine surrounded by quotation marks

for example, "extent of gender wage discrimination"

Internet Paper Mills

There are nearly 100 Internet paper mills throughout the world used by students. These are a few of the largest that also advertise directly to students:

Research papers Online

FastPapers.com

Cheathouse.com

An excellent list of "Cheating 101: Internet Paper Mills" is maintained by Margaret Fain, Library Instruction Coordinator, Kimbel Library, Coastal Carolina University.