Software system that takes a submitted text as input, and compares the text against a set of publicly available and privately held documents, resulting in a similarity report. The similarity report includes marking of similar or identical text, hyperlinks or other references to sources that match it, and an overall similarity report. In some cases, the similarity report can be customized to include or not quoted text, and to include or not the bibliography (where the use of a style will ensure that the text of any citation matches the same text in any other document citing the same source).
Published in Chapter:
Combating Plagiarism: A Three-Pronged Approach to Reducing Prevalence in Higher Education
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 17
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1610-1.ch010
Abstract
This chapter describes a hybrid approach to combating plagiarism, as developed over the course of a decade. This approach is based on a three-component framework. The first step is educating students about the differences between quoting, paraphrasing and plagiarizing, using examples. Second, students are introduced to plagiarism detection software in use. Students are shown how the software works, the type of reports it generates, as well as some of the most egregious examples of plagiarism encountered in this class in past years (anonymized, of course). A key part of this second step is to show students what the expectations are, in terms of what level of similarity between their paper and their sources is acceptable (attributable to a chance match) and what is blatant (clearly a deliberate act). Finally, the third component is follow-through i.e., reporting students to the university's administrative structures.