What is Plagiarism? | How Common is It? | Why Do Students Plagiarize? | How Do They Plagiarize? | What Are Paper Mills?

What is Plagiarism?
From Webster's Third New International Dictionary: Plagiarize - \'pla-je-,riz also j - -\ vb -rized; -riz·ing vt [plagiary] : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (a created production) without crediting the source vi: to commit literary theft: present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.

Plagiarism can be divided into three basic varieties:

   1. Using another person's words without giving them credit. The rise of the Internet and advances in technology make this form of plagiarism easier than ever - with a simple point, click, cut, and paste, the student has someone else's words in his or her paper.
   2. Taking another person's ideas without giving them credit. Students often think that by paraphrasing, they can avoid plagiarism. However, simply changing words around or substituting synonyms is not enough - credit must always be given to the author with the original idea. This can be a difficult concept for students to grasp.
   3. Citing sources that you never looked at, or making up references. This form of plagiarism is likely to occur when a student is required to have a certain number of references in their paper. Instead of doing research on their own, students may be tempted to steal another person's sources.

How Common is It?
In 2001, Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University performed a study of 4,500 high school students that found that, "74 percent of students admitted to cheating seriously on an exam one or more times; 15 percent admitted to turning in a paper largely taken from a Web site or a paper mill; and approximately 51 percent admitted to not citing the source from a Web site when using a few of its sentences in their papers" (Straw).

Another study performed in 2002 asked 698 undergraduate students how often they plagiarized. In this study, only 24.5 percent admitted to having cut and pasted text from the Internet without proper citation. Interestingly, more than 90 percent of the undergraduates reported that their peers were probably doing the same (Kellog).

An article on the National Science Teacher Association web site reports that, "In another poll, 80 percent of top high school students admitted to cheating during their academic careers, the highest percentage since the "Who's Who Among American High School Students" survey began 29 years ago. In the survey, 95 percent of cheaters said they had never been caught" (Toppo).

Why Do Students Plagiarize?
From the University of Alberta Libraries:

• Lack of research skills
• Problems evaluating Internet sources
• Confusion between plagiarism and paraphrasing
• Careless notetaking
• Confusion about how to properly cite sources
• External factors (pressure from family/peers; attitudes toward school, etc.)
• Internal factors (poor time management, lack of organization, etc.)
• Culturally based attitudes toward plagiarism

How Do They Plagiarize?
One easy way for students to plagiarize is to cut and paste text from websites on the Internet. This cyberplagiarism can be difficult to pinpoint. Envision a paper where a student has lifted a sentence or two directly from one Internet source, inserted some original material, followed by a close paraphrasing of a different web source, etc.

Students utilize free or for-profit Internet paper mills. The paper mills that charge can be very expensive, but there is still no guarantee of the quality of the work the student will be receiving. Papers on these sites are often organized by topic. Many of them, particularly on the free paper mill sites, are written at a high school level.

Using work that has been written by another student is a popular way to plagiarize. For instance, students copy other students' work that has been posted to the Internet as parts of personal or educational sites. Students also turn in papers that have been turned in by other students in previous years. Fraternity and sorority test files are still popular sources for cheating.

Students copy from books and reference materials, though they often hesitate to use books because they are unsure how much a professor would be capable of recognizing.

Plagiarized material may come from journal articles found in library databases such as EBSCOHost and LexisNexis, therefore they are not detectable by search engines.

What Are Paper Mills?
According to the University of Alberta Libraries website, a paper mill is "a term applied to providers of pre-written term papers and other "educational tools" via the Internet. Some web sites offer thousands of papers online." Simply put, a paper mill is a place on the web where students can download papers on a wide variety of topics.

Some paper mills such as BigNerds.com offer term papers for free. These sites are generally divided according to topic. Other paper mills operate on a trade basis - in order to receive a paper, a student must submit a paper. Many other paper mills charge for access to their papers. Prices can range anywhere from $5 an essay, to $20 a page.

There are hundreds of paper mills on the Internet. For a list of many of them, see Kimbel Library's site on Internet Paper Mills.