Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers

The availability of reference material (books, journals, encyclopedias, Web articles, blogs, and so on) in electronic format has made plagiarism easier than ever. Copying and pasting of a sentence or two, a few paragraphs or even an entire essay now can be performed with just a few mouse clicks. The strategies discussed here can be used to combat what some believe is an increasing amount of plagiarism on research papers and other student writing. By employing these strategies, you can help encourage students to value the assignment and to do their own work.

Strategies of Awareness

1. Understand why students cheat.

Regardless of how often papers with plagiarized content appear in a faculty member’s in-box, I hesitate to believe that most students’ are intentional, career cheaters. By understanding some of the reasons students plagiarize, you can take steps to prevent cheating–both intentional and unintentional–by attacking the causes well in advance of paper assignments. Some of the major reasons include these:

• • Many students simply do not know what plagiarism is. Their awareness, if any, often derives from urban legends and myths. Some of these myths include:
    • “Everything on the Internet is public domain and can be copied without citation.”
    • “If you change an author’s words into your own words, you don’t have to cite it.”
    • “If you copy fewer than ten words, it’s okay not to use quotation marks.”

• • Many other students know what plagiarism is, but don’t consider it wrong. Some have a personal belief that “information wants to be free,” and that copying from others is merely an acceptable practice of recycling, a sort of ecological practice. Then, too, some faculty actually encourage copying from sources with a few words of one’s own because that is “patch writing,” a normal way to write. So the plagiarizer you catch might not be the defiant, lazy cheater you assume, but a practical, “community of words” compiler of essays using fellow writers’ verbal structures.
    If you have foreign students, be aware that some cultures encourage “honoring” well-known persons by using their words (silently quoting them) without clear attribution. Some clear discussion at the beginning of the course, clarifying what is acceptable and whatg is not, will help allevieate this issue.
  • Students are natural economizers.  Many students are interested in the shortest route possible through a course.  That’s why they ask questions such as, “Will this be on the test?”  Copying a paper sometimes looks like a shortcut through an assignment, especially when the student feels overloaded with work already.  To combat this cause, assign your paper to be due well before the end-of-term pressures. Two thirds of the way through the course rather than in the final week can help spread the students’ work load.
    Remind students that the purpose of the course is not just to “get through” or to “crank out a bunch of assignments and get them out of the way,” but to learn and develop skills. Writing a research paper helps to develop the skills of researching (hunting for something in the information universe), problem solving (the principal work of most people), critical thinking (a lifelong skill if ever there was one), writing (language is the most powerful weapon on earth), perseverance, and commitment. It follows that the more students learn and develop their skills, the more effective they will be in their future lives. Emphasize the process and the benefits, not just the product.

• Students are faced with too many choices, so they put off low priorities. With so many things to do (both academic and recreational in nature), many students put off assignments that do not interest them.  A remedy here would be to customize the research topic to include something of real interest to the students or to offer topics with high intrinsic interest to them.
• Many students have poor time management and planning skills.  Some students are just procrastinators, while others do not understand the hours required to develop a good research paper, and they run out of time as the due date looms.  Thus, they are most tempted to copy a paper when time is short and they have not yet started the assignment.  If you structure your research assignment so that intermediate parts of it (topic, early research, prospectus, outline, draft, bibliography, final draft) are due at regular intervals, students will be less likely to get in a time-pressure panic and look for an expedient shortcut. This strategy will also help you discover when a student is on a downward spiral, having taken on too broad a topic or too narrow an approach.
• Some students fear that their writing ability is inadequate.  Fear of a bad grade and inability to perform cause some students to look for a superior product they can submit as their own.  This is sometimes called “cheat to compete.” Sadly, these students are among those least able to judge a good paper and are often likely to turn in a very poor copied one.  Some help for these students may come from demonstrating how poor many of the online papers are and by emphasizing the value of the learning process (more on this below).  Reassuring students of the help available to them (your personal attention, a writing center, teaching assistants, online writing lab sites, etc.) may give them the courage to persevere.
• A few students like the thrill of rule breaking.  The more angrily you condemn plagiarism, the more they can hardly wait to do it.  Remember that not every student is in your class to learn how to write or to learn the course subject. Some students just want to get through, and if they can cheat on a paper, saving them hours of work, they feel superior in the knowledge that they have saved time and effort that the poor fools who actually did the assignment had to waste. An approach that may have some effect is to present the assignment and the proper citation of sources in a positive light (more below). Learning to write makes a person powerful.

2. Educate yourself about plagiarism. Plagiarism on research papers takes many forms.  Some of the most common include these:

• Downloading a free research paper.  Many of these papers have been written and shared by other students.  Since paper swappers are often not among the best students, free papers are often of poor quality, in both mechanics and content.  Some of the papers are surprisingly old (with citations being no more recent than the seventies).
• Buying a paper from a commercial paper mill.  These papers can be good–and sometimes they are too good.  If you have given students an in-class writing assignment, you can compare the quality of the student’s in-class work to that of the submitted paper and be quite enlightened.  Moreover, mills often sell both custom and stock papers, with custom papers  becoming stock papers very quickly.  If you visit some of the mill sites, you might just find the same paper available for sale by searching by title or subject.
• Copying an article from the Web or an online or electronic database.  The giveaway of this popular method is that only some of these articles will have the quantity and type of citations that academic research papers are expected to have.  If you receive a well-written, highly informed essay without a single citation (or with just a few), it may have been copied wholesale from an electronic source. Web articles like these are often doctored with fake citations to make them look more like the required assignment.
• Copying a paper from a local source.  Papers may be copied from students who have taken your course previously, from fraternity files, or from other paper-sharing sources near campus.  If you keep copies of previous papers turned in to you, they can be a source of detection of this particular practice. If you change topics regularly, you’ll get fewer previous papers turned in to you.
• Cutting and pasting to create a paper from several sources.  These “assembly-kit” papers are often betrayed by wide variations in tone, diction, and citation style.  The introduction and conclusion are often student-written and therefore noticeably different from and weaker than the often glowing middle. A paper that mixes formal English with colloquialisms, APA citation with MLA citation, or changes point of view is likely not original.
• Quoting less than all the words copied.  This practice includes premature end quotation marks or missing quotation marks.  A common type of plagiarism occurs when a student quotes a sentence or two, places the end quotation mark and the citation, and then continues copying from the source.  Or the student may copy from the source verbatim without any quotation marks at all, but adding a citation, implying that the information is the student’s summary of the source.  Checking the citation will expose this practice. Note: Some students will argue with you if you catch them doing this. You claim plagiarism but they say they had an honest intent by including a citation. They just misplaced the reference.

Using your institution’s plagiarism checking service. Many institutions now require students to submit their essays and papers electronically to plagiarism checking services like Turnitin. These services can identify much of the plagiarism in student papers by comparing student work with an ever-growing database of posted works.
An Aside.Plagiarizers, in my experience, tend to be lazy, so they copy whatever shows up on a Google search, and they are easily caught by the professor or by the commercial plagiarism checkers.
One evening I was sitting in my easy chair at home, grading essays, book reviews for first year composition. I grabbed the next paper and began to read. “This sounds fammiliar, “I thought. I wonder if it was copied from a paper last year.” This was at a time before commercial plagiarism checkers were available. As I read on, the paper seemed more and more familiar. Very, very familiar. Finally, I flipped back through the last half dozen reviews and there it was, an exact copy of the paper. By the time I finished grading the pile, I found three identical papers–that had all been copied from a paper that had been turned in to me the previous semester.

• Faking a citation.  In lieu of real research, some students will make up quotations and supply fake citations.  The fake citation can be either completely fabricated (“In the article, ‘Plenary Constructs of Stereotypic Deviation in a Norms-Based Sociodrama,’ Manfred Coors states, etc. The American Journal of Asymmetric Induction Studies), or it can reference a real source (book, journal, or Web site) which contains no such article or words that appear in the student’s paper. You can discover this practice by randomly checking citations.  If you require several Web or other electronic sources for the paper, these can be checked quickly.

Visting some of the sites that give away or sell research papers can be an informative experience.  If you have Web projection capability, you might do this visiting in class and show the students (1) that you know about these sites and (2) that the papers are often well below your expectations for quality, timeliness, and research. You can find mills by googling “free research papers” or similar search text.

3. Educate your students about plagiarism. Do not assume that students know what plagiarism is, even if they nod their heads when you ask them. Provide an explicit definition for them. For example, “Plagiarism is using another person’s words or ideas without giving credit to the other person. When you use someone else’s words, you must put quotation marks around them or set them off in a block quotation and give the writer or speaker credit by revealing the source in a citation. Even if you revise or paraphrase the words of someone else or just use their ideas, you still must give the author credit in a citation. Not giving due credit to the creator of an idea or writing is very much like lying because without a citation, you are implying that the idea is your own.”

In addition to a definition, though, you should discuss with your students the difference between appropriate, referenced use of ideas or quotations and inappropriate use. You might show them an example of a permissible paraphrase (with its citation) and an impermissible paraphrase (containing some paraphrasing and some copying), and discuss the difference. Discuss also quoting a passage and using quotation marks and a citation as opposed to quoting a passage with neither (in other words, merely copying without attribution). Such a discussion should educate those who truly do not understand citation issues (“But I put it in my own words, so I didn’t think I had to cite it”) and it will also warn the truly dishonest that you are watching.  Wholesale copying is obviously intentional, but a paper with occasional copy and paste sentences or poorly paraphrased material might be the result of ignorance. It’s a good idea to teach students (or at least provide a handout) about paraphrasing, summarizing, quoting, citing, and indicating clearly the difference between their own ideas and ideas or words from a source. (The Learning Strategies for Paraphrasing and for Summarizing might prove helpful here. You might send your students to these pages.)

Discussing with students why plagiarism is wrong may be helpful also.  Clarifying for them that plagiarism is a combination of stealing (another’s words) and lying (claiming implicitly that the words are the student’s own) should be mentioned at some point, but should not be the whole emphasis or you risk setting up a challenge for the rebels (those who like to break the rules just for fun).  Many statements on plagiarism also remind students that such cheating shows contempt for the professor, other students, and the entire academic enterprise.  Plagiarizers by their actions declare that they are not at the university to gain an education, but only to pretend to do so, and that they therefore intend to gain by fraud the credentials (the degree) of an educated person.

Perhaps the most effective discussion will ask the students to think about who is really being cheated when someone plagiarizes.  Copying papers or even parts of papers short circuits a number of learning experiences and opportunities for the development of skills: actually doing the work of the research paper rather than counterfeiting it gives the student not only knowledge of the subject and insights into the world of information and controversy, but improves research skills, thinking and analyzing, organizing, writing, planning and time management, and even meticulousness (those picky citation styles actually help improve one’s attention to detail).  All this is missed when the paper is faked, and it is these missed skills which will be of high value in the working world.  A degree will help students get a first job, but performance–using the skills developed by doing just such assignments as research papers–will be required for promotion.

4. Discuss the benefits of citing sources.

Many students do not seem to realize that whenever they cite a source, they are strengthening their writing, not weakening it. Citing a source, whether paraphrased or quoted, reveals that they have performed research work and synthesized the findings into their own argument. Using sources shows that the student is engaged in “the great conversation,” the world of ideas, and that the student is aware of other thinkers’ positions on the topic. By quoting (and citing) writers who support the student’s position, the student adds strength to the position. By responding reasonably to those who oppose the position, the student shows that there are valid counter arguments. In a nutshell, citing helps make the essay stronger and sounder and will probably result in a better grade.

Appropriate quoting and citing also evidences the student’s respect for the creators of ideas and arguments–honoring thinkers and their intellectual property.  Most college graduates will become knowledge workers themselves, earning at least part of their living creating information products.  They therefore have an interest in maintaining a respect for intellectual property and the proper attribution of ideas and words.

5. Make the penalties clear. If an institutional policy exists, quote it in your syllabus. If you have your own policy, specify the penalties involved. For example, “Cheating on a paper will result in an F on that paper with no possibility of a makeup. A second act of cheating will result in an F in the course regardless of the student’s grade otherwise.”  If you teach at a university where the penalty for plagiarism is dismissal from the university or being reported to the Academic Dean or Dean of Students, you should make that clear as well.  Even the penalties can be presented in a positive light.  Penalties exist to reassure honest students that their efforts are respected and valued, so much so that those who would escape the work by fakery will be punished substantially. Note: There are always a few students who will be caught plagiarizing and then claim that no one cared or told them. When you point to the section in your syllabus, they will say, “I thought it was a generic syllabus so I didn’t read it.” The better idea, then, is to read the appropriate places from the syllabus to the class at the first meeting.

Strategies of Prevention

The overall goal of these specific strategies is to make the assignment and requirements unique enough that an off-the-shelf paper or a paper written for another class or a friend’s paper will not fulfill the requirements. Only a newly written paper will.

1.  Make the assignment clear.

Be specific about your expectations.  Should the paper be an individual effort or is collaboration permitted?  Must the paper be unique to your course, or do you allow it to be submitted to another course as well?  (In scholarly publishing, such multiple publication is usually called self-plagiarism.)  What kind of research do you require?  How should it be evidenced in the paper, by quotation or just summary?  It has been claimed that a major source of poor student papers (not just plagiarizing) is the unclear assignment.  You might ask another faculty member to read your paper assignment and discuss with you whether or not it is clear and detailed enough for students to fulfill in the way you intend. Or discuss it informally after class with a few students to see how clearly they understand.

2. Provide a list of specific topics and require students to choose one of them. Change topics from term to term whenever possible. Unusual topics or topics with a narrow twist are good because there will be fewer papers already written on them. If you provide a substantial enough list of topics (say two dozen), most students will find something that can interest them. You can also allow for a custom topic if the student comes to discuss it with you first.

3. Require specific components in the paper. For example, “The paper must make use of two Internet sources, two printed book sources, two printed journal sources, one personal interview, and one personally conducted survey.” Or, “You must make use of Wells’ article on ‘Intelligent Design Principles,’ and some material from either the Jones or Smith book.” Or, “Include a graph which represents the data discussed in the first section.”  Requirements that will strongly inhibit the use of a copied paper include these:

• Use of one or more sources written within the past year, and, if appropriate for you subject area, no sources more than five years old. A requirement like this will quickly outdate most paper mill products. (However, be on the alert for citation upgrading–altering the date of publication from, say 1987 to 2015.)
• Use of one or more specific articles or books you name or provide.  The articles could be available online (from the Web or one of your university’s proprietary databases) to save the effort of photocopying and distribution.
• Incorporation of some information you provide (for example, a data set).
• A personal interview with an expert or authority.  An interview creates both a current and a checkable source.

If a student begins with someone else’s paper and has to work additional material such as the above into it, you’ll probably be able to tell. (For example, the fit will be awkward where the new material has been stuffed in or the writing styles will differ.)

4. Require process steps for the paper.  Set a series of due dates throughout the term for the various steps of the research paper process: topic or problem, preliminary bibliography, prospectus, research material (annotated photocopies of articles, for example), outline, rough draft, final annotated bibliography, final draft. Some of these parts can be reverse engineered by the determined cheater, but most students should realize that doing the assignment honestly is easier than the alternative.

The rough draft serves several functions.  A quick glance will reveal whether whole sections are appearing without citations. At the draft stage, you have the opportunity to educate the student further and discuss how proper citation works. You can also mark places and ask for more research material to be incorporated. If you are suspicious of the paper at this point, ask for the incorporation of some specific material that you name, such as a particular book or article.  Keep the drafts and let students know that you expect major revisions and improvements between drafts. (This is actually a great way to improve students’ writing, quite apart from the other goal of preventing plagairism.)

5. Require oral reports of student papers.

Ask students questions about their research and writing process. If students know at the beginning of the term that they will be giving a presentation on their research papers to the rest of the class, they will recognize the need to be very familiar with both the process, the content, and the sources of the paper.  Such knowledge should serve as a strong deterrent against simply copying a paper.  Regardless of how many times a student reads over a copied paper, much of the knowledge of the research, the drafting, leaving out, and so on will still remain unknown.  Alternative to an in-class presentation is a one-on-one office meeting, where you can quiz the student about several aspects of the paper as needed.

Many students have been caught by simple questions like, “What exactly do you mean here by ‘dynamic equivalence’?” Few students use words they cannot pronounce, so having them read some of the paper aloud can be interesting as well (although you may be merely exposing the mindless use of a thesaurus). If you suspect a student has copied a whole paper, complete with citations, asking about the sources can be useful. “Where did you find the article by Edwards? It sounds fascinating.  Can you bring me a copy at the next meeting?” Or, “This quotation seems slightly out of context. What was Follet’s main point in the chapter?”

6. Have students include an annotated bibliography. The annotation should include a brief summary of the source, where it was located (including call number for books or complete Web URL or DOI), and an evaluation about the usefulness of the source. (Optionally, as a lesson in information quality, ask them to comment on why they thought the source was credible.) The normal process of research makes completing this task easy, but it creates headaches for students who have copied a paper from someone else since few papers include annotated bibliographies like this. Another benefit of this assignment is that students must reflect on the reliability and quality of their sources.

Another Anecdote One semester I discovered a few paragraphs in a student paper that sounded familiar. The discussion was so clear, so well written, so focused on the topic, so persuasive, that is was no wonder the student had used it. “I wish I’d said that,” I thought. In fact, I had. The entire section had been lifted from one of my own books. Too bad the student hadn’t cited the source. I was tempted to write, “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” but because the plagiarism meant that the student would be given an F in the course and possibly be expelled, such humor would be in bad taste.

7. Require most references to be up-to-date. Many of the free term papers online (and many of the ones for sale) are quite old, with correspondingly old references. If you require all research material to be, say, less than five years old, you will automatically eliminate thousands of online papers.  Such a recent date restriction is not usually workable for some subjects, such as history or English literature, but you can always require a few sources of recent date. (But, as mentioned above, be on the alert for citation upgrading, where the date of publication is changed from an older date to a recent one.)

8. Require a metalearning essay. On the day you collect the papers, have students write an in-class essay about what they learned from the assignment. What problems did they face and how did they overcome them? What research strategy did they follow?  Where did they locate most of their sources? What is the most important thing they learned from investigating this subject?  For most students, who actually did the research paper, this assignment will help them think about their own learning. It also provides you with information about the students’ knowledge of their papers and it gives you a writing sample to compare with the papers. If a student’s knowledge of the paper and its process seems modest or if the in-class essay quality diverges strikingly from the writing ability shown in the paper, further investigation is probably warranted.

Strategies of Detection

1.  Look for the clues.

As you read the papers, look for internal evidence that may indicate plagiarism.  Among the clues are the following:

• Mixed citation styles.  If some paragraphs are cited in MLA style, while other references are in APA, and perhaps one or two are in CBE or Chicago, you are probably looking at a paste-up.
• Lack of references or quotations.  Lengthy, well written sections without documentation may have been taken from general knowledge sources, such as encyclopedias, popular magazines, or Web sites.
• Unusual formatting.  Strange margins, skewed tables, lines broken in half, mixed subhead styles and other formatting anomalies may indicate a hasty copy and paste job.
• Off topic.  If the paper does not develop one of the assigned topics or even the topic it announces, it may have been borrowed at the last minute or downloaded.  Similarly, if parts of the paper do develop the subject, but other parts seem oddly off, the product may be a cut and paste.
• Signs of datedness.  If there are no references after some well past date (e.g. 1985), or if a data table offers a company’s sales from 1989 to 1994, either the student is using very old material or the paper itself is rather old.
• Anachronisms.  If the paper refers to long-past events as current (“Only after the Gulf War is over will we see lower oil prices” or “Why isn’t the Carter administration acting on this?”), you almost certainly have a recycled paper on your hands.
• Anomalies of diction.  Many undergraduates do not understand the concept of levels of diction.  They think all words are equally welcome in every paper.  As a result, when those who plagiarize with the cut-and-paste method perform their deeds, they often mix paragraphs of varying levels together–the sophisticated scholar’s paragraph precedes the breezy journalist’s commentary, which may be followed by the student’s own highly colloquial addition. Similarly, you may come upon some suspiciously elevated vocabulary usages.  “Thesaurusitis” is one source of this, to be sure, but a common source of such vocabulary is another writer, who should have been quoted rather than simply copied. Asking for clarification of some vocabulary during an office conference can sometimes be enlightening. “What do you mean by ‘ineffable’?” or, “On page three you refer to ‘an anhydrous personality.’ Could you clarify that characterization and explain why you chose it?”  Lastly, if you find that the paper uses several archaic terms, or words no longer used in the way the paper uses them, you may be looking at some very old text.
• Anomalies of style or spelling.  Is the prose style remarkable? Are there two-page paragraphs that remind you of a nineteenth-century encyclopedia? Is there ornate rhetorical structure?  Does the introduction get in its own way and stumble around, only to give way to glowing, flowing discourse?  Is there a mixture of British and American punctuation or spelling, with consistent usage within large sections? An American student writing, “The flavour of the cake was not affected by the aluminium foil wrapping,” has perhaps copied the sentence.
• Smoking guns.  This category might be called “blunders of the clueless,” since it includes obvious indicators of copying.  Reported in the past have been labels left at the end of papers (“Thank you for using TermPaperMania”), title pages stapled to Web printouts (complete with dates and URL in the corners), title pages claiming the paper is by Tom Jones when subsequent pages say “Smith, page 2,” and papers with whiteout over the previous author’s name (from back in typewriter days).

Few of these clues will provide courtroom proof of plagiarism, of course, but their presence should alert you to investigate the paper.  Even if you do not find the source of the paper, you may be able to use these clues profitably in a discussion with the student in your office.

2.  Know where the the sources of papers are.  Before you begin to search for the source or sources of a suspect paper, you should know where to look.  Here are the major sources of text in electronic form:

• Free and for-sale term paper sites.  As mentioned earlier, simply google a relevantg phrase such as “term papers online” and see what you get.
• The free, visible Web.  This category includes all the publicly mounted Web pages, which are indexed by search engines.
• The free, invisible Web.  This cateory includes the contents of sites that provide articles free to users, but that content may be accessible only by going directly to the site.  That is, the articles are not indexed by search engines and therefore cannot be located by using a search engine.  Some magazines, newspapers, reference works, encyclopedias, and subject-specific sites are in this category.
• Paid databases over the Web.  This category includes commercial databases for consumers (such as Northern Light’s Special Collection) and databases that libraries subscribe to, containing scholarly journals, newspapers, court cases and the like. Providers like Lexis-Nexis, UMI Proquest, Infotrac, JSTOR and others are in this group. To find information from this category, you must have access to the database (through password or an on-campus computer) and search on the database directly.
• CD-ROM resources.  Encyclopedias and some databases are available on CD-ROM.

3. Search for the paper online. 

If you suspect the paper may have come from the Web, you might try these strategies to find it:

• Google it. Just go to Google, and perform an exact phrase search on a four-to-six-word phrase from a suspect part of the paper (find a phrase that has two or three relatively unusual words in it).
• Next, locate some appropriate databases on the invisible Web, depending on the subject of the paper.  You can find many of these databases by consulting the “World Wide Web Research Tools” page on this site. If indicated, visit some of the online encyclopedias as well.  Here, you will have to use keyword searches rather than exact phrase searches, but using a string of appropriate keywords can be very powerful.
• Now go to your library’s online database subscriptions and search on subject-appropriate databases using keyword searches.

It is sometimes said that the best plagiarism detector is the student who handed in the paper, because he or she already knows whether or not the paper is genuine, or what part is fraudulent.  Therefore, you can sometimes enlist the student’s help.  You must be very careful about accusing a student of cheating unless you have clear proof, because a false accusation can be both cruel and reason for litigation.  But if you ask the right questions in the right way, you will often be successful. (A book you might find useful is Spy the Lie, which offers techniques for detecting deception when you interview others. See the ad nearby.)  Here are some example questions that may help reveal the truth:

• “I was quite surprised by your paper, so I did some investigation into it.  Before I tell you what I found out, is there anything you want to tell me about it?”  With the appropriately serious demeanor and tone, a well phrased question like this will often result in a confession.  If the student is innocent or just hardened and replies, “No,” you can always reveal some innocuous fact and go on.
• “I’m curious to know why your writing style is so good in some parts of the paper and so poor in others.  And why have you not shown such great writing on the in-class essays?”
• “This long passage doesn’t sound like your normal style.  Is this a quotation where you accidentally forgot the quotation marks?”
• “Explain to me again what the rules for paraphrasing or summarizing are. Some of the passages in your paper make me think you might be unclear about them.”
• “Is there any reason that a class member would tell me that you didn’t write this paper?”