It's Culture, Not Morality - INSIDE HIGHER ED

Scott Jaschik

What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure? Computer software, threats on the syllabus, pledges of zero tolerance, honor codes -- what if all the popular strategies don't much matter? And what if all of that anger you feel -- as you catch students clearly submitting work they didn't write -- is clouding your judgment and making it more difficult to promote academic integrity? >>>

Problems with anti-plagiarism database

Mauno Vihinen

NATURE|Vol 457|1 January 2009

SIR — Sophisticated tools have been developed to detect duplicate publication and plagiarism, as noted in M. Errani and H. Garner’s Commentary ‘A tale of two citations’ (Nature 451, 397–399; 2008) and in your News story ‘Entire-paper plagiarism caught by software’ (Nature 455, 715;2008). >>>

Entire-paper plagiarism caught by software - NATURE

Thousands of 'similarities' found between papers.

Declan Butler
Nature 455, 715 (2008)

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Many of the duplicates in Deja Vu come from non-English-speaking countries, and some scientists have asserted that a degree of plagiarism is justified as a way of improving the English of their texts (see Nature 449, 658; 2007). "There definitely is a cultural component," says Garner, "but this appears to be an equal-opportunity behaviour, with scientists from across the world involved."

When confronted with their plagiarism, some researchers can be brazen. One offender, whose paper shared 99% of its text with an earlier report, wrote to Garner: "I seize the opportunity to congratulate [the authors of the original paper] for their previous and fundamental paper — in fact that article inspired our work."