possible plagiarism

[David J Birnbaum]

Dear SEELANGers,

I'm afraid I can't help with the case in question, but last year I
encountered several instances of plagiarism in courses in my department,
some internet-related and some not, and some of what I learned may be
useful for other instructors:

1) I'd be very careful about mentioning even a suspicion of plagiarism to
a student if I couldn't prove it by producing the source. A faculty
colleague in another department here was certain that a paper was
plagiarized, told the student, and issued a grade of incomplete while
searching for the source. When I heard about this (from the dean) it was
still pending, but the university said that if the student denied the
accusation and the faculty member couldn't find the source, however
certain he might be from the style or content, the decision would have to
go in the student's favor. This may not be true at all universities, but
if your university won't back you up unless you can produce a source, you
might want to be careful about accusations.

2) Tracking down Internet plagiarism is easy; if the student can find the
paper on the internet, so can you. (Even some of the sites that charge for
papers give the first few sentences as samples.) Go to one of the search
or metasearch sites that supports boolean searching (the kind where you
can specify multiple keywords and retrieve only documents that contain all
of them), pick several telling keywords from the paper, and fire away. It
took me less than a minute (literally) to catch each of two internet
plagiarists last year. You can find a partial list of search and
metasearch sites by visiting my home page (see below) and connecting to
the "serious links" subpage. I've had good luck with Altavista.

3) Non-internet plagiarism is tougher, although I caught several of these
last year, some from books and some from encyclopedias. To narrow the
search, look for anachronisms (I recieved a paper about Chagall that wrote
about him in the present tense, as if he were still alive, which helps
restrict the books I had to check) and thematic clues (very general
biographical overviews are often encyclopedic, specialized ones are often
forwards to monographs or collections, close readings are often monographs
or articles).

4) Colleagues can be a big help in tracking down sources for plagiarism,
especially in survey courses, where the instructor may not be sufficiently
experienced with all topics to recognize plagiarism sources quickly.

Good luck,

David
________________________________________________________________________

Professor David J. Birnbaum     email: djbpitt+ at pitt.edu
Department of Slavic Languages  url:   http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~djb/
1417 Cathedral of Learning      voice: 1-412-624-5712
University of Pittsburgh        fax:   1-412-624-9714
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA