The Ginger (Law) Librarian

Expensive plagiarism detection software from vendors such as Turnitin and SafeAssign proves to be no better than Google at detecting plagiarism. In fact, in past studies, Google has done a better job. InsideHigherEd  recently reported on a study by Susan E. Schorn from the University of Texas at Austin.  The data come from Susan E. Schorn, a writing coordinator at the University of Texas at Austin. Schorn first ran a test to determine Turnitin’s efficacy back in 2007, when the university was considering paying for an institutionwide license. Her results initially dissuaded the university from paying a five-figure sum to license the software, she said. A follow-up test, conducted this March, produced similar results. For the 2007 test, Schorn created six essays that copied and pasted text from 23 different sources, which were chosen after asking librarians and faculty members to give examples of commonly cited works. Examples included textbooks and syllabi, as well as website...

In my past post on plagiarism , I discussed some of the pitfalls of not discussing plagiarism in a seminar class. Often, the students are not aware that what they are doing (or not doing) can be considered plagiarism. In anticipation of a plagiarism instruction session that I am giving to a colleague's seminar class, I thought I would post this " nifty plagiarism infographic " that asks questions to determine the severity of plagiarism. In scholarly writing, it is expected that an author use a considerable number of footnotes to substantiate assertions and arguments given in the text. There is absolutely no reason not to give credit where credit is due. And this infographic gives an idea of when credit is due.

When students are assigned research papers (really at any level of education), there is undue attention paid to sources. The professor might tell the student, "I want you to find twenty sources. And within those twenty sources, five must be print, five must be journal articles, and the remaining ten are of your choice. Oh and don't cite Wikipedia." The theory behind this is that the students will learn valuable lessons about finding sources such as how to use a library or vetting for reliability. So what's the problem? Recent studies "tell us that students can find sources; the trouble is they don’t read them, or they read only enough to find a useful quote, or they choose sources that are not particularly insightful ones, or their paper becomes merely a description of the sources they’ve found with little analysis or original thought. A more sophisticated mistake is to seek out only sources that support a previously-held belief." A preprint of an a...

I recently ran a plagiarism check for a law school faculty where the student author had repeatedly lifted information from unattributed resources, as well as misused information with improper attribution.  In Scholarly Writing, I define plagiarism as lifting information from unattributed resources, but I also consider the misuse of information as plagiarism.  An example of the misuse of information would be if a student author uses a direct quote without quotation marks and puts a see signal at the beginning of the footnote as if it were an inference to the source rather than a direct quote from the source. My Scholarly Writing class is heavily focused on proper citation.  The students spend countless hours learning about the citation method ( Bluebook ) and how to properly attribute resources.  I also explain that one of the defining features of a law review article is the extensive use of footnotes, which means that the students should never feel the need...