Preventing Plagiarism

Janet Stemwedel, blogging at "Adventures in Ethics and Science", discusses a paper on preventing plagiarism:

Bilic-Zulle, L., Azman, J., Frkovic, V., & Petrovecki, M. (2008). Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing? Science and Engineering Ethics, 14 (1), 139-147 DOI: 10.1007/s11948-007-9037-2

The authors discuss plagiarism detected in papers written in Croatian in a medical school program, and note that the amount of plagiarism dropped significantly when the students were informed that their papers would be checked by software.

Psychological warfare works, apparently. The question is, how long until people end up just buying ghostwritten papers?

Quoting Twitter

An interesting question came up yesterday as I was helping prepare some web content on how to quote things from the Internet properly. The question was: How do you quote a Tweet on Twitter?

My first feeling was - sure, if there is anything on Twitter worth quoting, it should be quotable. So we set about looking for something to quote and then figure out how to quote it properly.

We looked and looked, but I had to admit that there was nothing in my Tweetstream I felt was fitting enough to quote. So - we tweeted something in order to quote it:



Now, all we have to do is quote it. We looked and looked for how to find the status number of the tweet, it took quite sometime until we found it hidden under the time stamp. Click on it, and you get a web page with just this tweet, and the URL is the unique name with the ID number for the Tweet. So all you have to do now is write

Tweet by WeWuWiWo. http://twitter.com/WeWuWiWo/statuses/11094244580, from March 25, 2010.

Glad we got that settled. 

Me and Jesus and Dan Brown

My Google-bot just alerted me to a rather bizarre page. The Süddeutsche automatically collects information for a page about a particular topic, and has a box on the side for people associated with the topic.

This is what shows up for the German word for plagiarism: 

I rather fascinating company I keep. I can pretty much figure out why everyone is there, with the exception of Jesus....

Paper Mills

Two things in my inbox today that fit so well together, the links need to be noted here:

• Reader HD found this on China Daily: Fake papers are rife at universities. It includes a number of statistics for China and notes that teachers often write papers in order to make a living wage. Imagine getting a paper handed in that you wrote yourself....
• My Googlebot on Plagiarism keeps turning up articles at suite101.com. Yesterday's link was "The Danger of Online Essay Services" by Cynthia Jones-Shoeman. This is a rather strange site - they have a lot of great articles on proper studying, but the navigation soon sucks you into a vortex of advertising.

Students don't realize that one of the reasons they are in college is to learn to think, structure, and write. Many just want the degree to earn more money...

Plagiarius Awards 2010

The prizewinners have been named for the Plagiarius competition 2010. A jury of designers, intellectual property specialists, economists, and media people had a hard pick between the 43 nominations. Looking at the winners one gets the impression of seeing double.

The award, a black garden dwarf with a golden nose (spoofing the German saying "earning yourself a golden nose), never seems to be picked up. The exhibits can be seen at the museum in Solingen.

Plagiarism and no end

In the never-ending story of Helene Hegemann and her plagiarism in the book "Axolotl Roadkill", the German newspaper FAZ (which seems to have devoted approximately 100 pages of newsprint to this topic in the last few weeks) has printed a comment by Durs Grünbein entitled "Plagiarism".

It was a puzzle for the readers, who quickly thought that the way of writing was so old-fashioned and remembered a piece by Gottfried Benn from 1926, also entitled "Plagiarism".

One wonders if the newspapers now think that plagiarism is okay, just as long as they tell us in the end who the real author might have been.

Update: The blog Dialog International has a nice translation of the meatist parts:

Gottfried Benn:
"Was heißt demgegenüber Entlehnung, was Plagiat oder Herkunft des Materiellen, man vergesse doch nicht, dass diese Begriffe in Sphären liegen, die ohne Raum und ohne Atem sind. Seit es Welten gibt, wo immer sich Reiche des Geistigen bildeten, gab es nur eine einzige Sphäre, in der alle Begriffe des Seelischen Maß und Halt, Verurteilung oder Rechtfertigung enthielten, die Sphäre des Schöpferischen, die Kunst."
(What, by contrast, constitutes borrowing, what is plagiarism or origin of the material. Lest we forget that these are terms in the spheres, which are breathless and space-less. Ever since worlds have existed, wherever spiritual realms were formed, there was only one sphere which contained all the terms of the spiritual dimension and support, condemnation or justification, the sphere of creativity, art.)

Hegemann:
"Das, was wir machen, ist eine Summierung aus den Dingen, die wir erleben, lesen, mitkriegen und träumen. Originalität gibt's sowieso nicht, nur Echtheit."
(What we do is the sum of the things that we experience, read, observe and dream. There is no originality, only authenticity.)

DFG: Quality, not Quantity

The German basic research funding agency DFG announced a decisive change for its application and reporting procedures on Feb. 23, 2010. They will no longer count the number of publications as a quality indicator.

Instead, researchers may only list up to 5 publications - their most important publications. No publications that have been submitted or are in preparation will be accepted, only published or accepted for publication papers are allowed. For reporting on grants or for research directly related to the current grant application, a maximum of two papers per grant year may be listed.

The new rules take effect in July 2010. The DFG states explicitly that they want to go against the trend to equate quantity with quality. They want referees to focus more on the project goals.

They note that the recent spate of academic misconduct cases were not the reason for them changing the rules. And they realize that it will be difficult for researchers to change how they write grant applications. But they feel that most scientists will learn the first time they get a grant rejected for putting too many publications on their C.V.

I heartily applaud the decision of the DFG and sent the press release to all of my colleagues. There has already been moaning - if publications aren't counted any more, the lazy people will now have another reason not to publish. This will certainly be a continued, interesting discussion in Germany.