Mouse Click Plagiarism: The Role of Technology in Plagiarism and the Librarian's Role in Combating It - Statistical Data Included

Library Trends, Wntr, 2001 by Nicole J. Auer, Ellen M. Krupar

ABSTRACT

THE PROLIFERATION OF PAPER MILLS, FULL-TEXT DATABASES, and World Wide Web pages has made plagiarism a rapidly growing problem in academia. Possible factors influencing student behaviors and attitudes toward plagiarism include ignorance, lack of personal investment in their education, situational ethics, and lack of Consistent styles among and within various disciplines. Librarians are in a unique position to help prevent and detect plagiarism by forming partnerships with faculty to re-examine assignments and instructional sessions and by informing them of Internet paper mills and useful Internet search strategies.

INTRODUCTION

In a Seattle Times article, Leon Geyer, the faculty advisor for the undergraduate honor system at Virginia Tech, was quoted as saying: "In the olden days, a student had to go to the library, dig up the information and retype it. Now you can sit in your dorm room and just reach out, point and click" (Benning, 1998, paragraph 8). Benning further stated: "Teachers and administrators agree cheating is on the rise--computers have made it so easy" (paragraph 4).

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

As Wilson Mizner said: "When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research" (quoted in Bartlett, 1992, p. 631). Plagiarism was probably the second idea. Views on plagiarism have changed over time. Often, imitation in phrasing or style has been seen as complimentary or respecting the learned masters. In some art, using the same motifs or arrangements to reflect on a historical manner of creation is the proper thing to do. Students also learned how to do something by copying a finished piece. Even today, students of art paint imitations of great works in order to learn techniques such as brush strokes, use of color, or depiction of perspective. However, in such cases, the students are not passing off these imitations as an original expression of a creative impulse. Today, many students are stealing material from the Internet and turning it in as their own work, either directly from paper mills or by "cutting and pasting" from Web pages. Malcom Maclachlan (1999) of TechWeb News quotes teachers as saying that "cheating, especially in the form of plagiarized term papers, is on the rise because of the easy availability of material on the Internet" (paragraph 2).

THE PROBLEM

Cases from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) Undergraduate Honor System Web site illustrate what we, as a profession, must prepare ourselves and our faculties to confront. Figure 1 shows the honor court statistics at Virginia Tech for the last three years which clearly illustrate a marked increase in the total number of honor code violations in that short amount of time. Interestingly, half the cases for 1998/1999 were reported during exam week.

Figure 1. Judicial Statistics for the Virginia
Tech Undergraduate Honor System.

Academic Year            1996-97   1997-98   1998-99

Number of Cases            142       282      450(*)

Guilty by Judicial          77       175      182
Panel and affirmed
by Review Board

Not Guilty by               42       100       16
Judicial Panel

Dismissal by Review         23         7        1
Board or Chief Justice

Other-pending,               0         0      252
transferred to
Graduate Honor
System

(*) 230 cases since April 30, 1999

One sample case involved four students who all turned in the same, or nearly the same, paper in the same class. In contrast to traditional methods of plagiarism, the students did not copy off each other or take from a stock of papers available at a local campus fraternity or sorority. Instead, students used computers to search the Internet for the same assigned topic in the same paper mills and happened to select the same paper to propose as their own work. All four were found guilty and given Class II sanctions which, according to the Virginia Tech Honor System Constitution, includes honor system probation and education, recommended double-weighted zero on the assignment or on any grade affected by the offense, and fifty hours of university service (Trial Abstracts, n.d., paragraph 8).

CONTRIBUTING FACTORS

Several theories are proposed to explain the recent increase in plagiarism cases. Contributing to the explosion of plagiarism, particularly involving Internet-based resources, is the historically libertarian nature of the Internet where commentary is free-wheeling and anti-establishment. Gresham (1996) states that library users have trouble realizing that Internet material is intellectual property worthy of proper citation. In fact, Macdonald and Dunkelberger (1998) found that only 7 percent of their sample of students cited information found on CD-ROM or via the Internet as coming from an online source but rather cited the information as coming from a print source.

Compounding this issue is the lack of consistency among citation style guides, particularly regarding online information (Malone & Videon, 1997; Fletcher & Greenhill, 1995). Fletcher and Greenhill (1995) found Xia Li and Nancy Crane's (1993) work Electronic Style: A Guide to Citing Electronic Information to be the only style guide with a consistent system for citing online information. Although this work was originally published before the widespread use of HTML, the 1996 revision includes citations for World Wide Web documents. The latest print Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), copyright 1994, does not adequately address online information. There is an update on the APA Web site ("Electronic Reference," 2000), but it still does not cover all types of online information such as listserv postings. Further, there are a number of Web sites providing individual interpretations of the different styles, with no official blessing by the professional associations. More importantly, each of the different citation styles uses such different formats, requiring different bits of information. It is not uncommon for a student to become very confused between APA and Modern Language Association styles. Depending on what the professor prefers or the discipline of study, a student may be required to use four different styles in one semester. It is no wonder that sometimes the student gives up and does not cite information properly.