Postgraduate Diary: Plagiarism Happens to the Best of Us

Further to my previous posts on plagiarism and my warning in the citation guide for this website, it is humbling to learn that plagiarism can be committed by even the best of scholars. The Times Higher Education Supplement this week announces that "Cambridge University Press will issue an apology and correction after The Times Higher revealed that passages in its Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence had been lifted from a 1960s work without acknowledgement." Apparently two Cambridge scholars, Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate, had quoted from Graham Hough's book The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H. Lawrence without acknowledgement. Thankfully, according to Kevin Taylor, director of intellectual property at CUP, the plagiarism appears to have been due to unconscious error: "The co-authors made notes before writing up their chapter, and Con Coroneos made notes on Dr Hough's book without annotating them, which he later took to be his own words."

Though in my earlier comments on the subject I have admonished those visitors to The Pequod who may deliberately represent my work as their own, plagiarism of the passive sort is certainly the more insidious, and perhaps even the more serious. For my own part, I am sure that in my 100 000 word thesis, some concepts will be paraphrases or - horror - direct quotations of authors I have read, and that some will slip through the net of my referencing due to my shoddy scholarship and less than meticulous methods. Though I try to keep my bibliographic databases up to date, and in all my writing make footnotes referring in brief to the full Reference Manager record, in many cases in which I was desperate to get the flow of my thoughts on page uninterrupted I have digitally scribbled an "xxx" instead of an author's name. Like pornography or weak Australian beer, these letters indicate something nasty lurking beneath my thesis. I hope that as I start to edit and proof over the coming final year, the xxx's resolve themselves into proper names and books, and remove any risk of my having copied the work of others without acknowledgement.

Plagiarism (Again)

An email I received last month from a teacher confirms for me what I had long suspected: that this site is being plagiarised, and my essays passed off as others' work. I am not sure if I can feel guilt about this - plagiarism has always happened in paper form, and the benefits of me using this digital space as a substitute for being published on physical pages outweigh the risks of others abusing it. I have commented before about the measures (explicit warnings and a citation guide) I have taken to minimise the risks of plagiarism, or at least leave plagiarists with no excuse.

However, an email a few days ago reminded me (as my correspondent did) of the other academic moral problem of this website, which is that my Google Adwords links sometimes promote "paper mills," or assignment writing sites. Another email a couple of days ago reminds me of this. It was from "the UK's most visited essay company," asking if I would like to exchange links. The email noted that the company had "been featured on ITN News, the BBC, Radio 2 and Radio 4, in the Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent and hundreds of other publications." Indeed, if you go to the website of this company, which shall remain nameless, there in a bold headline banner is a quote from The Times: "The essay was independently assessed by a leading university as being of 2.1 standard." Hilariously, though, if you follow the link it leads to the article headlined "Student Cheats Fuel Online Essay Boom," and is an expose on the prevalence of cheating in university law degrees. Of course, the disclaimer made by the companies is that the essays are provided as a "basis for producing your own work. Just as you would not reproduce a book or journal which happened to exactly address your question, you should not hand in our essays as your own. We stress this time and time again but it is a point that the press fail to appreciate - we do not condone plagiarism." Yeah, right - stupid press for not appreciating how helpful these companies are to education. A quote from the boss of similar service says all you need to know about their real moral attitude: "The more complaints about us the more hits we get (on the website). We are all prostituted to something; it is not my problem. If you buy a gun in a shop, what you do with it is your business." Well, frankly, if I sold guns, like all legitimate stores I would make it my business to ensure that they are held by people with the proper licenses for the correct purposes. It would not be of moral concern to me only if I was a black market dealer, selling guns for the improper purposes of crime. And the black market is precisely where these sites peddle their words.

So I wrote a snotty email back to the company, explaining why, as a university teacher, albeit at a minor level, it would be wholly inappropriate for me to endorse their product with a reciprocal link. More generally, however, I realise that whilst I have tried to block many of these adverts from my Adwords account (a fact which led me deeper into a moral maze) , it is always going to be a losing battle. As I have almost reached the magic $100, at which point Google will send me a nice cheque to cover the costs of my web hosting, I was considering deleting Google Adwords altogether from the popular essay pages. However, the company whose motto is "Don't Be Evil" gets there first, announcing that it is going to ban advertisements for essay writing sites.

Postgraduate Diary: Plagiarism

I was obviously quite amused by the discovery that my work was being used by students at an American university as part of their course. But this finding, in conjunction with the fact that, over the last couple of months, hits to this site have shot up to about 200 a day, reminds me of a more serious problem of publishing online. As I said, I have just finished marking my first batch of essays; it is not, in my opinion, particularly challenging to mark a university essay, because the categories are so broad: almost by the end of the first paragraph I am generally sure whether it is going to be a 2.1 or a First. And of far more importance than the grade itself is the discursive individual handback session with each student. However, as a postgraduate tutor I do lack one key skill that a more experienced tutor has, which is to be attuned to recognise where work has recruited specific ideas or phrases from an existing critic.

Sometimes I can spot plagiarism. Last year, for example, by the time I had read five essays all talking about the "fetishistic pistols" in Hedda Gabler, I had twigged that there must be some source from which this nice quote was drawn, and it wasn't too difficult to trace it to an essay by Elaine Showalter. But more difficult to spot are those paraphrases of less well-known critical texts. Whereas a lecturer on the course will probably have read most of the works on the subject, I do not have the time or need to do this. Hence it is quite possible that in some of the essays given to me a phrase has slipped passed my red pen radar. Neither am I in the position to experience something one of the tutors who ran our teaching induction had: an essay which blatantly plagiarises a book which the tutor herself had written.

Having said that, there is the possibility that this might happen through this website. As a fellow postgraduate blogger has recently experienced, with online sources increasingly used by tech-savvy students, the chances of work drawn from the internet being applied in essays increases as well. Clearly, in a digital age, it ought to be correspondingly easier to trace plagiarism of online sources immediately through tools such as Turnitin. But these are not perfect, and not all tutors have access to it - I don't, or I would have checked to see whether it registered the essays available on The Pequod, which with my increased hits and with me now being a scholar of international reputation, may increasingly be a source for plagiarism. I would be horrified to learn that this is the case; so at the weekend I put a piece of warning text at the top of every essay:

Plagiarism is theft! If using this essay in your own work, please ensure you use the correct citation.

Not that this will prevent a plagiarist, but it at least salves my conscience to know that I have publicly denounced and drawn attention to it, and take no pleasure from students using my work unless, as with those lucky students who studied it as part of their course, they acknowledge it.