[Air-L] Plagiarism: student and other!

[Murray Turoff]

I was very pleased that NJIT early on bought into "turnitin.com" which is an
amazing system.  Since i have a lot of project type assignments with write
ups, before that i had to guess at what might be cases of plagiarism and put
in google searches.   If you have never used it, it accumulates files of
everything on the web and any papers by students for future use.   It was
amazing to find a paper by a student using un-noted quotes from a paper by a
student at some foreign university.   It keeps a database of all your
student papers and if some other professor gets a match, they ask your
permission to give them access to the whole paper.



At the graduate level and senior courses i finally gave my students access
to put in their papers and modify them using the results till they were
satisfied that the only quotes were clearly referenced.  I also got in the
habit of putting in papers i was asked to review from professional
conferences and journals and some of those were rather surprising on the
lack of clear attribution for what they were using.  I would even put in my
own drafts as sometimes you are unaware something you used recently was
really something you read many years ago.  I think journals, conferences
should sponsor access for authors and reviewers.



Since retiring i miss the regular use of it.   It was also useful in
checking for missing references.

It even shows quotes of partial sentences where the student was trying to
reword the quote without referencing it.  Finding 20 or so papers used to
make the paper was not unusual.


-- 
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Information Systems, NJIT
homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff