Education Improves Plagiarism Detection by Biology Undergraduates

Abstract

Regrettably, the sciences are not untouched by the plagiarism affliction that threatens the integrity of budding professionals in classrooms around the world. My research, however, suggests that plagiarism training can improve students' recognition of plagiarism. I found that 148 undergraduate ecology students successfully identified plagiarized or unplagiarized paragraphs three-quarters of the time. The students' ability to identify plagiarism was not significantly different when the quoted or paraphrased text included complex sentence structure and scientific jargon and when it included only simple sentences that mostly lacked jargon. The students who received plagiarism training performed significantly better at plagiarism detection than did those who did not receive the training. Most of the students, independent of training, identified properly paraphrased, quoted, and attributed material but had much greater difficulty identifying paraphrases that included long strings of copied text-up to 15 words-or proper paraphrases that lacked citations. The misunderstanding of paraphrasing and citation conventions found here could manifest as unintentional plagiarism in these students' later work.

Examining students’ perceptions of plagiarism: A cross-cultural study at tertiary level

“…This, however, may indicate conscious and deliberate effort on the part of lecturers to diminish plagiarism. Contrary to the present study, Holt (2012) found that most of the American students representing the Western world were unable to identify problematic texts.…”

Plagiarism or not? investigation of Turnitin®‐detected similarity hits in biology laboratory reports

“…with the goal to determine if a match was significant or if the similarity could be attributed to chance alone. Others have deemed the appropriation of five or more consecutive words from a source as constituting an incident of plagiarism . However, in this study, the laboratory reports contained a substantial amount of technical terminology that could not have been expressed differently.…”

“…Only the relevant parts of the lab manual (Butler and Noree, 2012) are shown. The numbers in parentheses in the left column (1,9,7, and 64) that precede the matched text indicate the different sources to which Turnitin ® attributed these matches. Match 1 was attributed by Turnitin ® to the laboratory manual, while matches 9, 7, and 64 were attributed by Turnitin ® to laboratory reports by other students.…”

Are Canadian professors teaching the skills and knowledge students need to prevent plagiarism?

“…Researchers have deplored the fact that students do not receive the necessary training to understand and prevent plagiarism (Holt, 2012;McGowan & Lightbody, 2008). Students themselves feel they lack academic literacies and confidence on entering universities (Palmer et al, 2018).…”