Discouraging Plagiarism

• Encourage students to think on their own. Help them practice writing in their own words and not paraphrase. Look for concepts instead of just answers.
• Give out assignments that require your students to investigate.
• Have your students turn in thesis statements, outlines, working bibliographies, and research notes. Have students maintain a research log.
• You can have your students include notes on what databases they searched, what reference materials they used, and even what questions they asked the librarians.
• Assign papers to groups.  Students can check themselves and learn about teamwork at the same time.

Recognizing Plagiarism

• Long sections of the paper that does not have references or quotations. May be copied from reference works or a web site.
• Different citation styles within the same paper.
• Strange formatting. Lines broken in half, tables in odd places or skewed, different heading styles.
• Is the section you are reading off topic? It is easy to make mistakes cutting and pasting.
  Do the references seem to stop at a certain date? Does a table offer information for a much older date range?
• Anachronisms. Does the paper refer to older events as current events?
• Different levels of diction. A student will often cut and paste a journalist’s paragraph with a scholarly article.
• Look for anachronisms of time. Does the work sound like it was written with a nineteenth-century thesaurus?
• Is there a mixture of British and American punctuation or spelling?
• Just plain clueless! Look for URL’s in the margins or other indications that the paper was purchased. Sometimes you will see things like “Davis, page 2” in the page heading when the paper is written by Smith. Also look for some obvious things like whiteout over previous author’s names.

If you suspect plagiarism...