Plagiarism

Free Plagiarism Software

For free plagiarism software try Scan My Essay as they have just announced an update of their VIPER downloadable plagiarism software solution. Best of all, it’s free.

Norfolk’s top doc accused of plagiarism

By Monte Sonnerberg. Norfolk and Haldimand’s acting medical officer of health has come under fire for a report he recently prepared on the subject of fluoridated water.

Dr. Malcolm Lock, who also serves as medical officer of health in Brant County, relied heavily on a nine-page report prepared two years ago by Toronto Public Health. The reports are so similar that Lock has been accused of plagiarism. Read the rest of this entry »

Shepard Fairey Speaks Out: Plagiarism or (Unattributed) “Reference”?

By Kerry Skemp. Our old friend, street artist slash vandalist slash conspiracy victim Shepard Fairey speaks out on his own site and in the Huffington Post about his alleged copyright infringement in using an AP photo to produce his now-infamous posters of Barack Obama. Read the rest of this entry »

The Origins of Darwin – the plagiarist?

If it was contemporary, the issue of plagiarism would arise because the words are virtually the same, or exactly the same.

His theory may have evolved in Tibet Charles Darwin has been accused of many things – but never before of being a closet Tibetan Buddhist. A leading scholar of human emotions and facial expressions has suggested his views on human compassion and morality were strikingly similar to those held by Buddhists. Read the rest of this entry »

Plagiarism Software to Go

It’s always good to see new plagiarism scanners appearing on the market. For a long time, Turnitin has closed its doors to allowing students to scan their own work, leaving them to worry about whether they have accidentally plagiarised in their work (and the grim consequences that would follow if they have).

Now Turnitin has a student service, but unsurprisingly, it costs money. So what are the alternatives?

UK website Scan My Essay offers two plagiarism scanners that seem to be a good alternative to Turnitin. Let’s have a look at each one.

Viper

VIPER is downloadable plagiarism software and isn’t VISTA compatible. The advantage of it being downloadable software is that it uses your connection to do the scan rather than a server connection. So if the website is busy, it doesn’t matter – you won’t be affected.

VIPER checks against all previous scans – and that’s a lot as VIPER’s been around a while. It also checks against the internet and against anything you ask it to check – an archive of files or a folder on your PC for example.

The plagiarism software has good settings control – so you can adjust it to be more or less sensitive depending on your preferences.

The slightly annoying thing is that you do have to sit next to your computer to watch the scan – sometimes you have to type in a Google captcha code to keep it running. But as the scans usually don’t take very long, that’s not a huge issue.

You can scan as many documents as you like at once, which is a benefit, although hundreds of documents logically take a lot longer.

VIPER doesn’t check against archives of digital books or journals, although it will detect any that Google has listed (quite a lot) so you’re covered pretty much as well as you would be with a Turnitin scan.

Overall this is a great piece of free plagiarism software, although if you’ve got VISTA you can’t use it unfortunately.

Raptor

Raptor plagiarism software is listed as VIPER’s alternative. It’s a purely online scanner so the benefit of this is that you can use it anywhere in the world, as long as you can remember your access details!

The scans are run through their servers, so if you have a slow connection speed, this is probably a better option for you.

As it’s online, VISTA or MAC compatibility is not an issue.

RAPTOR does scan against a library of digital books and journals, unlike VIPER – and it also scans the internet, archives of documents you upload, and against all past scans.

Users of plagiarism software will have different needs and RAPTOR and VIPER between them cover the great majority of those needs. Both are totally free and both offer free support. I’d like to see some additional features adding to Raptor as I think it could be improved – for example, scanning against your own library of documents is possible but a bit clumsy. But since both are free, and both work well, they are possibly the best free plagiarism software you’ll find. Your comments are welcome below!

Daggers are drawn between Costello and Turnbull

“Bishop had been tripped up on a few minor matters last year including accusations of plagiarism, and some in the media had tagged her gaffe-prone.”

Malcolm Turnbull phoned Peter Costello last Sunday morning, missed him and left a message. Costello phoned him back later in the morning. The two men don’t agree on much of what happened next.

Neither has spoken publicly about the specific content of the call. But each has given an emphatic account to his political intimates. And from these we have a very good idea of their wildly differing versions.

Why does it matter? One is the alternative leader of the country. The other is a potential alternative leader of the country. They are, notionally, in the same party. Yet they cannot both be telling the truth.

First, the reason for the call. The Opposition Leader had been troubled for months by the performance of his deputy, Julie Bishop, in her post as shadow treasurer. Read the rest of this entry »

Treasury: it’s a bloke thing

“…she made a few stumbles but the one that was most often thrown at her – plagiarism of a Wall Street Journal article – was a cut-and-paste mistake by a staffer.”

Julie Bishop’s resignation explains why so few women go far in politics.

THERE was a certain inevitability about Julie Bishop’s demise as shadow treasurer. Not because she was incompetent. She wasn’t. Not because she handled herself badly, made shocking errors or backstabbed her leader. Ditto, ditto, ditto. Read the rest of this entry »

Student plagiarism at ‘alarming levels’

A group of overseas and local academics discussed measures to counter the rampant practice of plagiarism among university students at a workshop this week.

Organised by Shue Yan University, the workshop, Combating Plagiarism in a Globalised Higher Education Environment: An International Perspective, explored why students plagiarise and measures to combat the problem.

Don McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers University in the US, said “the urge to succeed” and “close bonds between students” were possible reasons for the practice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editorial: Just say no to study drugs

Last week The Chronicle reported on a 2007 study conducted among students at Duke and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro that revealed an alarming rate of unprescribed ADHD medication use among undergraduates.

Nine percent of respondents admitted to having used ADHD medications without a prescription since they started college. Five percent reported use within the past six months. Rates of unprescribed use increased dramatically the longer students had been at college.

Read the rest of this entry »

A cheat, moi? That’s unfair

International students may be called plagiarists because of flawed thinking and naive use of software, says Niall Hayes.

If the new forms of detection software are to be believed, a sizeable proportion of students are plagiarists – and the worst culprits are international students.

But when does poor referencing and an inability to better phrase an original source become cheating – and a reason for serious disciplinary action and the humiliation that goes along with it?

An Australian study of Turnitin – a detection service that compares work submitted electronically with the 2.6 billion publicly available pages on the internet and with all the essays it has previously checked – found that 14 per cent of 1,925 essays examined contained examples of plagiarism. Unacceptable levels of plagiarism were found in all six universities in the study and in more than 70 per cent of the subjects covered. The study noted that what was detected was just the tip of the iceberg because Turnitin did not check against many books, journals or “paper mills”.

Read the rest of this entry »