WHAT CAN YOU DO?

SERVICES

  • www.plagiarism.org (computer checks paper against database of papers)
  • www.turnitin.com (computer checks paper against database of papers)
  • www.canexus.com (computer checks paper against database of papers)
  • www.plagiarism.com (Glatt test)
  • www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html (for computer code)
  • www.integriguard.com

    • STRUCTURE OF ASSIGNMENT

  • Don't allow students to pick topics; assign specific, current topics (student's won't be able to find boilerplate papers on their topic)
  • Require they include material (lecture material, required readings, class presentations, etc.) in their paper or project
  • Require they conduct a survey or interview and have them submit survey tool and results and/or interview transcript as appendix
  • Require their bibliography to be annotated (few term-paper services offer annotated bibliographies)
  • Require students to submit an abstract of their paper (besides testing their ability to boil their paper down to a one-paragraph abstract, few term-paper services include papers with abstracts)
  • Require students to document the research process (e.g., timetable or diary) and submit it as appendix
  • Require students to submit some of their "raw material" (e.g., photocopies of their pages from their notebooks or index cards, photocopies of articles or book chapters they consulted; printouts from web-databases will usually have printed date and time on the page--check for consistency with course calendar
  • Require the student follow a research schedule and report results back to you ongoing (e.g., week 1--conduct a preliminary literature search on the topic assigned; week 3--narrow topic and develop a thesis statement, etc.)
    •

    OTHER ACTIONS

  • Get to know writing style of student
  • If suspicious, speak with student and explore how they did their research
  • Check their sources
  • If they cite a book--is the book in the NJIT library? other nearby libraries? where did they get it?
  • If they cite an article--is the article in the NJIT library? full-text databases to which the library subscribes? where did they get it?
  • Use web search engines on suspicious phrases (to phrase-search most web search engines, enclose in quotes: "the aesthetics of post-modern discourse")

    • ASK YOUR LIBRARIAN FOR HELP

  • We can check citations--does it exist?; where is a copy available?
  • We can help with general web searches
  • We can help with checking full-text databases for citations and suspect phrases
    •

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