Plagiarism Resources

An ounce of prevention …

Ideas for “plagiarism-proofing” course assignments and developing a culture of academic integrity

• Virtual Salt: Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers. Built by Robert Harris, author of The Plagiarism Handbook.
• Guidelines for Plagiarism Prevention for faculty. From plagiarism.org.
• The Center for Academic Integrity, affiliated with the Robert J. Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina.
• Making Plagiarism-Proof Assignments from Colorado State University
• Plagiarism-Proof Assignments from a weekend seminar by Christopher Anson titled: Good Teaching Makes Good Citizens: Designing Plagiarism-proof Assignments.
• Plagiarism-Proofing Assignments by Doug Johnson, from the article ‘Plagiarism-Proofing Assignments’ published in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2004
• The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age, by Jamie McKenzie. From Now On: The Educational Technology Journal Vol. 7, No. 8, May, 1998.
• Plagiarism and the Web. by Bruce H Leland.

Teaching about Plagiarism

The Lee College Library has created an interactive tutorial that can be done face to face or online.

• Request an interactive face-to-face plagiarism class by one of the librarians.
• Try the online Plagiarism tutorial. This is interactive and will take time to do well. Contact the library for information on collecting statistics from student use of this tutorial.
• Contact the library to learn how to get any of our online tutorials integrated into WebCT

Detecting Plagiarism

• Safe Assign. Lee College subscribes to Safe Assign through our Blackboard/WebCT subscription. Contact the WebCT administrator for information.
• “The Glatt Plagiarism Self-Detection Test provides a ROUGH estimate that plagiarism has or has not occurred. Based on the percentage of correct answers, the test results are intended to be used to help you become aware of text which you may have inadvertently plagiarized.”
• The Plagiarism Resource Site provides, among other things, open source software developed by physics professor Louis A Bloomfield. The software looks through a collection of documents, looking for matching language.
• Links from the Plagiarism Resource Site including those to information and software.
• Internet search engines. Use quotation marks around distinct phrases within the suspect documents and search.
  Search engines do not contain the complete contents of the Web, so it is wise to search using more than one.
  • Google
  • Yahoo!
  • Bing
  • Ask
  • AOL
  • AltaVista
• Library databases. Academic Search Complete is the largest multidisciplinary database available to Lee, and is the best first choice.
  • From any library Web page, click on Articles & eResources under the Research Tools heading
  • Choose the letter A from the alphabetical list, choose Academic Search Complete, and, if off–campus, log in
  • In the first search box, put quotation marks around a questionable phrase in the document
  • In the drop-down box to the right of the search box, choose TX All Text. This instructs the search engine to search not just citation material, but the full text of the documents for the precise phrase within the quotation marks in the search box.
  • Search
  • Examine the results and adjust the search if necessary.