Friday, December 13, 2019

Plagiarism Checkers: What are They Checking For?



Plagiarism often becomes a moral issue. It’s a crime akin to stealing and it’s “lazy and deceitful.” A black and white issue deserving of punishment. However, the reality is that the issue is quite complicated and confusing. The confusion increases when we’re talking about research as in depth as a thesis or dissertation. Can I recycle material and quote myself? Is this self-plagiarism? How do I avoid plagiarism? How much recycled material is acceptable (See NIU graduate school policy on previously published material https://www.niu.edu/grad/thesis/pdf/ETD-Guidelines-Dissertation.pdf)? It’s usually up to your committee to detect and report plagiarism so your committee is your chief ethics officer. From there the consequences for academic dishonesty are pretty severe (see NIU Graduate School policy https://www.niu.edu/grad/thesis/pdf/ETD-Guidelines-Dissertation.pdf). Possible ramifications include revocation of degree and dismissal or suspension from NIU. Over-citing and being sure to use quotation marks in the draft phase and often are the best ways to make sure you don’t unintentionally get a little sloppy and misappropriate another scholar’s work. Paraphrasing and synthesizing sources as much as possible rather than direct quotations is an effective strategy too.


Now, in this digital age, there are plagiarism checkers online to use as a resource to ensure you avoid any ethics violation. Some services include turnitin, Plagium, and EndNote. Some universities now actually require graduate students to upload their manuscripts to a plagiarism checker before submitting a final draft for approval. Is this graduation requirement necessary and fair? Do plagiarism checkers really help graduate students and promote integrity or do they negatively impact research? Perhaps viewing plagiarism through a criminal lens as theft isn’t the most helpful approach since there is no loss of revenue incurred by the original researcher. “Original” deas are always a mixture of other ideas encountered, making it difficult to sort out attribution precisely. At the master’s and doctoral level researchers are undoubtedly trying out ideas and phrases to develop their academic voice and communicate authority. Until this skill is honed, often after the completion of the doctorate, there is a lot of borrowing happening. The nature of this working through ideas is certainly not deceitful but an integral part of the process for a junior researcher writing a thesis or dissertation. Researchers are reliant upon other researchers to fill in the context, the gaps, the missing steps to make meaning.

When ideas are reconstituted and recombined, who gets credit? These methods of integrating ideas do not always coincide with the purposes of attribution. Separating our thoughts from others’ thoughts becomes a murky process. Is this patchwriting? Citation standards vary from discipline to discipline making it difficult to ascertain what exactly constitutes intentional plagiarism. For second language learners the challenges are even more daunting. Instances of plagiarism go unaccounted for more often as the level of the sophistication of the argument goes up.

Some downsides to the plagiarism checker requirement include being flagged for your own work, terms of service which allow the service to forward your work to other universities to check their students’ work against, and United States Jurisdiction (Alameda County) over disputes relating to the use of the plagiarism site or services. These are all objections Travis Holland, doctoral student in the Communications Department at Charles Stuart University in Australia raised with the administration upon submission of his dissertation. Add to this the fact that turnitin is billion dollar business and offers funding to graduate students presenting research favorable to their service at conferences (as reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education) and it’s easy to see why any graduate student might be concerned. If plagiarism is unethical is turnitin an ethical response? It’s never bad to be overly cautious and perhaps scanning work with a plagiarism checker alleviates anxiety, but are these services really promoting academic honesty and integrity? Given that plagiarism is such a complicated issue and so difficult to define, and that standards are so field specific, are these detectors more competent than a committee chair? Let me know what you think!