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2 March 2011 Last updated at 11:33 GMT
A German minister has resigned after copying huge chunks of his doctoral
thesis, while the London School of Economics is probing whether Colonel
Gaddafi's son lifted chunks and used a ghost writer for his own. So is
plagiarism out of control?
It's been a bad week for honest educational endeavour.
The German defence minister has stepped down after being stripped of his 2006
university doctorate thesis for copying large parts of it. The University of
Bayreuth had decided Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had lifted whole sections
without attribution.
And the LSE is looking into allegations that Colonel Gaddafi's son, Saif
al-Islam plagiarised his PhD thesis.
These are very high-profile cases, but in the worlds of academia and
publishing, the issue of plagiarism has been a problem for many years.
The internet now offers students unparalleled opportunities to duplicate and to
fabricate, says Jude Carroll, of Oxford Brookes University, the author of A
Handbook for Deterring Plagiarism in Higher Education.
Start Quote
The pronouns go from single to plural, a sentence is cut off in the middle, or
a strange reference to Australia appears
End Quote Jude Carroll On the tell-tale signs
"Google gave students access to a much greater library of texts," she says.
"The opportunities to harvest material have increased."
Where once plagiarism might have involved extensive reading and copying by
hand, now it can be as easy as Googling the subject matter and hitting Ctrl+C,
Ctrl+V. From Wikipedia and other free sources to academic journal databases
like JSTOR, there's a treasure trove for the would-be cheat.
"The poet Byron never let people come into his library because he didn't want
people to see what he was copying from," Carroll notes, referencing a story
from Robert Macfarlane in the Times Higher Education.
"The difference now is that we can all copy each other's libraries."
Plagiarism has been with us for as long as the written word. From the classical
Greek playwrights, to Dr Martin Luther King, even the greatest of historical
figures have been tainted by scandal.
But over the last decade, academics have spoken out with increasing
exasperation over the tide of students using everything from Wikipedia to
bespoke essay writing services in pursuit of easy high grades. Universities are
involved in a cat and mouse game to stop the plagiarists in their tracks.
In the UK, 98% of universities now use a computer programme called Turnitin to
analyse suspicious essays, the company that provides it says.
The software scans text for passages which match a database of 155 million
student papers, 110 million documents, and 14 billion web pages. Back in 2006/
7, more than 600,000 essays were checked in this way in the UK. By last year,
that figure leapt to three million.
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and Angela Merkel The German minister has been
mocked as zu Googleberg for his extensive plagiarism
But of course, a matching passage does not necessarily indicate a plagiarist. A
scholarly essay is traditionally embroidered with well-chosen quotes and
references.
"The software is not a silver bullet," says Barry Calvert, of iParadigms, the
creators of Turnitin. "It still takes a human to detect a cheat."
Often, what appears to be fraud is simply a student who is unable to write
proper footnotes, or who forgets to accredit properly.
In cases of genuine deceit, suspicion is more often aroused by a lecturer
reading over the essay, and noticing "something which just doesn't feel right",
says Carroll.
"You might notice a sudden variation - from good language to bad, from academic
tone to journalistic tone. The pronouns go from single to plural, a sentence is
cut off in the middle, or a strange reference to Australia appears."
And who are the plagiarisers? Many are first year undergraduates who copy and
paste simply because they have not been given appropriate instructions on how
to write an essay, says Dr John Olsson, of the Forensic Linguistics Institute.
"You're just out of school and suddenly you're being asked to write 3,000 words
on a subject by Monday. It's a daunting task," he says.
Plagiarism allegations
else's novel
taking line in speech from Neil Kinnock
"I've handled cases where students were thrown off courses for paraphrasing a
couple of paragraphs."
But it's not just a problem in academia. Journalism is rife with episodes of
alleged plagiarism.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd admitted using a paragraph virtually
word-for-word from blogger Josh Marshall without attribution. Dowd, a Pulitzer
Prize winner, said her mistake was unintentional, claiming she had heard the
line from a friend.
And in the world of publishing, agents and editors must be on their guard for a
potentially commercially damaging episode of lifting.
In publishing, incidents of apparent plagiarism have increased a lot in recent
years, says literary agent Mark Lucas, due to such widespread access to
electronically transmitted data.
But while detecting plagiarism is increasingly difficult, the rules remain the
same, he says.
"Our agreement with our clients is that they undertake to us that plagiarism is
off limits, as it always has been," he says.
"The line that exists between something unique and original and something that
is clearly derivative is a relatively thick one still."
But there are some who think a more generous approach should be taken to lesser
offenders in the digital age.
Instead of coming down hard, first year students should be allowed a little
leeway, "to find their own voice", Olsson says. But for postgraduate students,
like zu Guttenberg and Gaddafi, there is no excuse.
'Mixing' not copying
There are some who sense a generational shift in what is and isn't acceptable.
Kaavya Viswanathan, whose 2006 young adult novel was the subject of extensive
and wide-ranging allegations of plagiarism, detailed at great length on
Wikipedia, came a cropper, and faced the wrath of her publisher.
But more recently Helene Hegemann, a 17-year-old German author, defended
herself against allegations of wholesale lifting by reference to "mixing" and
insisting: "There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity."
It's prompted discussions about the long tradition of authors drawing on other
people's work. Some would see a shifting into a more modern tendency to lift
other's stuff because of a failure to recognise long-held notions about
ownership of ideas.
But academics want to hold the line. Advances in technology do not mean we
should redefine our idea of what plagiarism is, says Olsson.
"I don't think we should change our standards. That would be very dangerous in
higher education," he says.
Carroll agrees: "Being 'original' does not mean having novel ideas never before
expressed by a human. It simply means doing the work for yourself."
Additional reporting by James Morgan and Brigitt Hauck