Plagiarism in Project Studies

Plagiarism is condemned yet remains a frequently occurring form of academic misconduct. This editorial informs project scholars about plagiarism and Project Management Journal’s ( PMJ®) approach to it. We define plagiarism as the theft of words, ideas, and representations, and explain three principles to judge plagiarism based on our expectations on research integrity: honesty, originality, and authorship. Accordingly, plagiarism detection services (PDS) assist but do not limit our judgment. We hope to lay the foundation for a comprehensive understanding of plagiarism in project studies, and thus help (early career) scholars understand the different facets of plagiarism and thereby avoid it.

The Moral Hazards of Using Turnitin as a Learning Tool

Plagiarism detection service like Turnitin can be powerful tools to help faculty evaluate whether a student’s paper is plagiarized. But there’s another side to Turnitin: The service promotes itself as a way to help teach students how to avoid plagiarism. I argue that the use of plagiarism detection services as learning tools actually contributes to the problem of plagiarism, by encouraging the idea that original papers are the goal of a class, instead of instruments to assess a student’s ability to understand the class material. In addition, giving students access to the very tool that professors use to evaluate the authenticity of a paper allows students to use the tool to intentionally plagiarize in a way that passes the test. While plagiarism-detection services can help professors investigate suspected acts of plagiarism, they should not be used as a tool to teach students how to write papers.

Protecting students' intellectual property in the web plagiarism detection process

<p class="AbstractText">Learning management systems (LMS) play a central role in communications in online and distance education. In the digital era, with all the information now accessible at students’ fingertips, plagiarism detection services (PDS) have become a must-have part of LMS. Such integration provides a seamless experience for users, allowing PDS to check submitted digital artifacts without any noticeable effort by either professor or student. In most such systems, to compare a submitted work with possible sources on the Internet, the university transfers the student’s submission to a third-party service. Such an approach is often criticized by students, who regard this process as a violation of copyright law. To address this issue, this paper outlines an improved approach for PDS development that should allow universities to avoid such criticism. The major proposed alteration of the mainstream architecture is to move document preprocessing and search result clarification from the third-party system back to the university system. The proposed architecture changes would allow schools to submit only limited information to the third party and avoid criticism about intellectual property violation. <br /><br /></p>

The Case of the Pilfered Paper: Implications of Online Writing Assistance and Web-Based Plagiarism Detection Services

While there is nothing new about academic dishonesty, how it is committed, prevented, and detected has been dramatically transformed by the advent of online technologies. This article briefly describes the concurrent emergence of online writing assistance services and Web-based plagiarism detection tools and examines the implications of both for student-faculty relations, faculty workload, and student learning. Finally, we provide three alternative strategies for deterring, detecting, and documenting all forms of plagiarism.