BMJ  2007;335:963-964 (10 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.39388.668773.47

Feature

Policing plagiarism

London

The internet has made both copying other people's work and detecting plagiarism much easier. Michael Cross looks at some of the tools used to tackle plagiarism

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In the internet age, copying someone else's work can be as simple as clicking and dragging a computer mouse over a few plausible paragraphs. By the same token, the world wide web makes fraud easy to detect. Over the past decade, a range of software products has become available for detecting plagiarism, especially by students. However, experts are questioning whether Britain's strategy for detecting academic fraud is the right one for catching the most damaging types of misconduct.

There is no evidence that plagiarism is becoming more prevalent in research. But there is no doubt that plagiarism happens, perhaps because of mindsets acquired in education.¹ The Committee on Publication Ethics, an international forum for editors of peer reviewed journals, has discussed "30 or 40" alleged cases of research plagiarism over the past 10 years, says its chairman, Harvey Marcovitch.

The most common type of plagiarism is where a relatively junior . . . [Full text of this article]

Defining plagiarism

Relying on a single tool

Alternative tools

Bespoke work

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