Saving Time and Stopping Plagiarism

Fall 2011 Session 1: Saving Time and Stopping Plagiarism

Topicmarks is a simple online tool that can save you time by helping summarize articles, websites, word documents, and PDFs. It also helps you stay abreast of current trends in your discipline without being overwhelmed. We’ll also talk about how this tool and other technologies can help you analyze your own writing, how some students could use these tools to plagiarize, and we’ll discuss strategies and resources to help detect plagiarism.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011: 3:00 p.m.-3:50 p.m.
Thursday, October 6, 2011: 11:00 a.m.-11:50 a.m

 

Tools:

Topicmarks 

•  Easy-to-use tool that helps summarize important parts of a document or website; identifies key terms (at top) & related concepts (in a word cloud format)
  

Paperrater.com

•  Takes you through a checklist beginning with the title and type of article and analyzes the content you copy/paste into the text box; it looks at title, spelling, grammar, phrases/cliches, word usage, etc. and gives pointers along the way

Autocrit.com

•  Free version of this tool allows you to submit 3 times/day with 400 word maximum.  Checks for overused words, sentence variation, cliches, etc. 

Google Phrase Search

• Putting quote marks around a phrase or sentence will search for that exact phrase
• Use with portions of sentences or copy/paste entire sentences into Google without quotes to find closely paraphrased text

Summari.es

• Tool that takes an article in your web browser and summarizes it at the top of the page (short, 1 paragraph)--Note: this program has had errors the last week; I might recommend trying it again after a few more weeks The Summari.es website is no longer active (updated 2/8/12)

Links and Resources:

Academic Integrity and Plagiarism Resources; University Teaching Development Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

• Particularly useful is the Plagiarism detection checklist under "Detecting Plagiarism."
• Also helpful: "Useful web sites for further reading"

Anti-Plagiarism Strategies for Research Papers; Robert Harris, Virtualsalt.com

• Yes, it looks like it was made in 1997; yes it has ads sprinkled throughout; however, the information within is actually quality and up-to-date
• Headers within are: Strategies of Awareness, Strategies of Prevention, Strategies of Detection

Avoiding Plagiarism; Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL); Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

• Not only does the OWL provide awesome citation examples, it also has a section on plagiarism: Overview (intentional and unintentional plagiarism, challenges), Is It Plagiarism? (When is credit given? When is something considered common knowledge?), Safe Practices (best practices for students as they write), Plagiarism Exercise (identifying proper and improper use), Best Practices for Teachers (outlining course policy)

Cheating 101: Internet Paper Mills; Coastal Carolina University, Conway, SC

• A list of over 250 websites students may access in order to cheat

How to Recognize Plagiarism; Indiana University Bloomington School of Education, Bloomington, IN

• Tutorial that gives an overview of plagiarism, examples, allows students to practice, and has a test students may take