Issue Brief: Plagiarism

Rebecca Moore Howard

Syracuse University

rmoorehoward@gmail.com    

Plagiarism has long been a concern of educators, but that concern has exponentially heightened in the environment of networked text. Some have responded by appealing to students' sense of personal integrity and community ethics; others, by using technology to police students' use of sources. Still others have perceived shifts in textuality itself, occasioned by new literacies; these educators search for revised ways of understanding the production and circulation of text--and thus new ways of mentoring students' relationship with sources. By these means plagiarism has become not just a "concern" of educators, but a topic for critical scholarship connecting pedagogy, technology studies, and authorship studies.

Leading Journals

Journal of Academic Ethics http://www.springerlink.com/content/1570-1727

International Journal for Educational Integrity http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/IJEI

Ethics and Behavior http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10508422.asp

Note: CCC and College English regularly publish some of the best critical discussions of plagiarism. The three journals listed above publish a wide range of perspectives on the topic, and some of them very juridical, others very critical of traditional definitions and approaches.

Relevant Organizations

The Center for Academic Integrity and its annual conferences promote the use of honor codes can be reached at http://www.academicintegrity.org. In the United Kingdom, the Joint Information Systems Committee, available at http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/IJEI,  promotes the use of Turnitin.com. I wouldn't endorse either, but scholars in the area need to be familiar with their work.

Relevant Web Sites                                      

Citation Project http://citationproject.net (disclaimer: it's *my* research!)

Association of College & Research Libraries. Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency.cfm 

Center for Academic Integrity http://www.academicintegrity.org

Council of Writing Program Administrators. "Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: WPA Statement on Best Policies." Jan. 2003. http://wpacouncil.org/node/9

"Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future." The British Library, 11 Jan. 2008.
 http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf

The LILAC Project: Learning Information Literacy across the Curriculum http://lilac-group.blogspot.com/2009/03/invitation-to-participate-lilac-project.html

Project Information Literacy: A Large-Scale Study About Early Adults and their Research Habits." http://projectinfolit.org/about/

To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence." National Endowment for the Arts, Nov. 2007. http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf

"Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy." National Endowment for the Arts, Jan. 2009. http://www.nea.gov/research/ReadingonRise.pdf

The Stanford Study of Writing http://ssw.stanford.edu

Sociocultural Theory http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/soc_cult.html

Relevant Email Discussion Lists