PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is the act of claiming to be the author of material that someone else actually wrote. Students have plagiarized book reports, term papers, essays, projects, and graduate-degree theses. Teachers plagiarised journal articles, course materials, and text books. Researchers have plagiarised reports, articles, and book chapters. Although academic plagiarism is not new, what is new since the latter years of the 20^th century is the ease with which writings on virtually any topic can be misappropriated with little risk of detection. The principal instrument responsible for the recent rapid rise in academic plagiarism has been the Internet, which John Barrie, a developer of software for detecting Web Plagiarism, called ‘a 1.5 billion-page searchable, cut and pasteable encyclopaedia.’