Dora D. Clarke-Pine examined 120 psychology dissertations in search of plagiarism. Checking for word-for-word sequences of ten or more words without proper attribution, she found plagiarism in four of every five dissertations. Checking for word-for-word sequences of five or more words, she found plagiarism in all 120. Read more:
The Seemingly Persistent Rise of Plagiarism (New York Times)
My intuition is that plagiarism is not generally the result of ignorance about what constitutes plagiarism. Think of the widespread habit of rolling through stop signs: everyone knows you’re supposed to stop, but doing otherwise is easy and almost always without consequences.
Related reading
All plagiarism posts (via Pinboard)
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Plagiarism in the news
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When Dora D. Clarke-Pine examined 120 psychology dissertations did she consider the possibility that in describing a thing there are only so many unique ways to do so? Because either I just described what she did "Dora D. Clark-Pine examined 120 psychology dissertations" or I plagiarized from Orange Crate Art. Perhaps she then further examined the papers, but the linked source article doesn't provide any insight as to addiitonal work performed beyond this simple analysis.
Good question. I’m assuming that she’s discounting false positives.
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