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Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers

Robert Harris

Version Date: November 17, 2004

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The availability of textual material in electronic format has made plagiarism easier than ever. Copying and pasting of paragraphs or even entire essays 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. 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. By understanding some of the reasons students are tempted to cheat on papers, you can take steps to prevent cheating by attacking the causes. Some of the major reasons include these:

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 a the 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. Remind students that the purpose of the course is to learn and develop skills and not just "get through." The more they learn and develop their skills, the more effective they will be in their future lives.

Students are faced with too many choices, so they put off low priorities. With so many things to do (both of academic and recreational 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.

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. 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. An approach that may have some effect is to present the assignment and the proper citation of sources in a positive light (more below).

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 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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Faking a citation. In lieu of real research, some students will make up quotations and supply fake citations. 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. There is a list of many of these sites at Termpapers.com at http://www.termpapers.com