Our comments and thoughts on the issue of plagiarism...

• What is Plagiarism?
• It’s Not Illegal … But It Can Be Used Illegally
• The Many Forms of Plagiarism
• Is it “Public” Information Just Because It’s Online?
• Is it Real or is It ...?
• A Varied and Widespread Problem
• Reasons for Plagiarizing
• Beat Plagiarism at Its Own Game
• Importance of Citation. Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
• The Roots of Citation
• It's a Matter of Responsibility
• The Unique Problem of Internet Citation

Plagiarism is quite simply intellectual property theft. It is fraud and an act of dishonesty.

It’s more than simply copying someone else’s work. It’s more than just “borrowing” someone's ideas. Plagiarism is a serious academic and ethical violation.

The online Encarta Dictionary defines “plagiarism” as:

Stealing somebody’s work or idea: copying what somebody else has written or taking somebody else’s idea and trying to pass it off as original.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary goes even further. It says, to "plagiarize" means:

• To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own: use (another's production) without crediting the source.
• To commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.

Plagiarism is not a criminal or civil offense. It’s not even a legal term. But violating a copyright or someone’s intellectual rights are illegal. And if someone plagiarizes, they may very well be committing either of those illegal offenses.

Further, according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, plagiarizing a work that doesn’t have a copyright (such as a work with an expired copyright) is a “breach of moral rights in jurisdictions where such rights are perpetual.”

Thanks to the Internet, students can access an unlimited amount of source material nearly instantly. Raw data, research papers, and entire books are there for the taking.

The next step is easy: cut out what you need and copy it to a new document.

Plagiarism is more than that. It’s also using information that may appear to be in the public domain but in fact isn’t. It may the result of not knowing how to properly attribute source material.

It’s also buying a written paper from any of the hundreds of online academic paper mills and putting the students own name on it.

The easily accessible and “open” nature of the Web blurs the line between public and protected information.

Electronic resources, which are so easy to reproduce, are often not considered "intellectual property" in the same way that printed material is. Like sharing music files or downloading software programs, it’s an easy leap of logic for students to download or copy material from an online publication and not consider it plagiarism – just because it’s on the Internet.

Sometimes, plagiarism can be easily spotted:

• A phrase in the text that is completely out of the writer's tone, style or theme.
• A passage, or even an entire paper, that is outside the student's normal level of work or exhibited abilities.
• Language that is technically or professionally specific - not in keeping with the overall tone of the student's work.

There are so many forms of plagiarism, it might be most helpful to cite some of the most famous - or infamous - examples of plagiarism. The following were collected from the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia:

• British pop group Nowaysis, a tribute band to the Gallagher Brothers, released a single in 1996 that heavily borrowed from the hit Shakermaker. The advertisement for the song read, "Hear Nowaysis plagiarizing Oasis plagiarizing The New Seekers plagiarizing The Beatles."
• Atari's video game Pong was accused by Magnavox of being a rip-off of Odyssey's tennis game.
• Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism as a young girl for a school composition. Mortified, she determined to have all future compositions screened by her friends before submission.
• According to a Boston University investigation into academic misconduct, Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized over one-third of the chapter of his doctoral thesis that summarizes the concepts of God expressed by Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman. It has been charged that for King's "I Have a Dream" speech, he plagiarized the 1952 address of Archibald Carey to the Republican National Convention.
• George Harrison was successfully sued for plagiarizing the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for the melody of his own "My Sweet Lord."
• Senator Joseph Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominations when it was revealed that he had failed a course in law school due to plagiarism. It was also shown that he had copied several campaign speeches, notably those of British Labor leader Neil Kinnock and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
• Popular historian Stephen Ambrose has been criticized for incorporating passages from the works of other authors into many of his books.
• Psychology professor René Diekstra, also well known as an author of popular books, left Leiden University in 1997 after accusations of plagiarism. Proceedings continued as of 2003, with Diekstra contesting a report about him on this matter.
• Alex Haley settled out-of-court for $650,000 after admitting he copied large passages of his novel Roots from The African by Harold Courlander.
• Eres, a Spanish song at the Eurovision Song Contest 1973, was a plagiarism of a Slovenian (then Yugoslav) song from ESC 1966 (Berta Ambrož: Brez Besed) but due to political reasons (the Cold War) it wasn't disqualified.
• Jayson Blair, then a reporter for the New York Times, plagiarized many articles and faked quotes in high-profile stories, including the Jessica Lynch and Beltway sniper attacks cases. He and several high-ranking editors from the Times resigned in June 2003.
• Moorestown Township, New Jersey, high-school student Blair Hornstine had her admission to Harvard University revoked in July 2003 after she was found to have passed off speeches and writings by famous figures, including Bill Clinton, as her own original prose in articles she wrote as a student journalist for a local newspaper.
• In 2003, the United Kingdom Government was accused of copying some text from the work of a California State University Monterey Bay post-graduate student for its security dossier on Iraq, dubbed by the media the "dodgy dossier."
• Long-time Baltimore Sun columnist Michael Olesker resigned on January 4, 2006, after being accused of plagiarizing other journalists' articles in his own columns.
• The doctoral thesis written by Kimberly Lanegran at the University of Florida was copied nearly verbatim by Marks Chabedi and submitted at The New School. When Lanegran discovered this, she launched an investigation into Chabedi, who was then fired from a professorship at University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and The New School revoked his Ph.D.
• The 1922 film Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Stoker's widow sued the producers of Nosferatu, and had many of the film's copies destroyed (although some exist to this day).
• Science fiction author Harlan Ellison sued and won in a case against James Cameron, claiming that his film The Terminator plagiarized the two episodes he wrote for the television show The Outer Limits: "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand."

The most common reason students give for plagiarism is that they don't know what plagiarism is or don't realize they were committing the offense.

Worse, some students don't consider plagiarism a serious offence, because they don't feel it harms another student.

In fact, studies show that students think that cheating on an exam is much more serious than plagiarizing. This shows how important it is to educate students about the seriousness of plagiarism.

Plagiarism can be deliberate or unintentional, which makes the causes complex. According to researchers and academicians, here are the main reasons students plagiarize:

• Lack of research skills. Students often don't know how to search library catalogues, databases or other reference sources.
• Inability to evaluate Internet sources. Students often assume what they find on the Internet is accurate or at least allowable research material, especially if it's a well-designed Web site.
• Confusing plagiarism with paraphrasing. Studies say that up to 60% of students cannot distinguish between paraphrased and plagiarized text. The problem is most acute when students are working with unfamiliar vocabulary and technical terms.
• Uncertain about terminology. Similar to the problem with paraphrasing, students often don't understand what is required of them. For example, students often don't know the difference between a report and an essay, an exposition and argumentation, or a theme and a thesis.
• Careless note taking. This can cause unintentional plagiarizing, if properly paraphrased text is mixed up with directly quoted material.
• Confusion about how proper citation. Inconsistency among the different style guides is major problem for students.
• Misconception over key terms: Plagiarism, intellectual property, copyright, public domain and common knowledge. These are all key terms that students need to learn to know to learn what is and is not plagiarism.
• Family and academic pressure. Sometimes, all that matters to a student are his or her grades, not how they are achieved.
• Lack of student ethics and academic relationship. Learning and the grading are often considered one in the same.
• Laziness and easy access. Combined with any other reason for plagiarizing, the mere ease with which information can be obtained on the Internet makes plagiarism a very attractive alternative for many students.

Top 10 Things You Can Do to Teach Students to Do It Right

1. Help students acquire basic research skills that they need appropriate to their education level.
2. Remind students there is no quality control on the Internet. Teach them to become familiar with library research guides.
3. Impress the importance of accurate and clear note-taking, so students don't mix their paraphrased materials with material that must be properly cited.
4. Help students get in the habit of consistently documenting proper bibliographic information.
5. Teach students the proper use of different types of research materials.
6. Help students understand - or guide them to the proper research materials to learn about - key terms related to plagiarism: plagiarism, intellectual property, copyright, public domain and common knowledge. Otherwise, they won't know what information is in the public domain, is copyrighted and what is intellectual property that requires proper.
7. Provide clear guidance about the goal of education so students know what academic dishonesty is.
8. Help student learn to manage their time better, so they don't need to plagiarize to make up for lost time.
9. Make plagiarism easy to understand. Ideas can be copied, but the exact words that expressed the ideas, and anything that can be cut and pasted must be cited.
10. Be sure students know what is expected of them.

Confusion about how to apply proper citation is one of the most common reasons for plagiarism, particularly unintentional plagiarism.

The problem is partly the result of inconsistency among so many different style guides. A student can use up to four different style guides in one year.

It's at the very root of academic research and study for a student to build upon the insights and writings we've of others. That's normal and expected. It's the way we learn to inquire, question, form opinions and state a case.

But a writer with integrity always clearly distinguishes between the information gleaned from a source and the writer's own reflections or understandings based on that work. Proper citation and attribution is the way a writer may use someone else's works and ideas on which to to build an original and honestly constructed document. So, proper citation and attribution is nothing more than the writer properly and respectfully declaring and acknowledging the debt that he or she owes to another.

Attribution must be responsible in every instance. Responsible attribution:

• Comes at a location and in a way that makes it perfectly clear who the writer is giving credit to.
• Lets the reader readily find the cited source for himself or herself.
• Expresses appreciation for work worth borrowing in the first place.

Online sources can be especially difficult to attribute properly.

• The style guides don't agree about how to cite online sources.
• The URLs for Web sites are constantly changing, often unwieldy and confusing.