The trouble with plagiarism and plagiarism-finders’ “Gotcha!”

The following is my recollection of something I read, about 35 years ago. A highly venerated professor-I remember only that he was from Cornell University-was charged with plagiarism in one of his papers / publications, whatever. His defence was not that he did not copy but it was impossible for him to remember from where he copied. This sounded strange to people who heard this claim – how could that be?

The professor led one of his visitors to his library, asked him to pick any of the books lining the shelf, open up any page and cite a line or two. What the professor did subsequently astounded the visitor – he continued reciting further the text in the book, word to word. You may call this apocryphal but I do not think it is, because when the issue was hot, and when the incident was not disputed by the named visitor, I had no ground for suspicion.

That gets me to the first point. You remember the details, but have forgotten from where you got it. Over the past 20 years I have been searching for a specific sketch (beautifully drawn) in a text book that explained vividly (I have not seen that principle better explained anywhere else) why a factor ½ enters into a particular equation, but in vain. I use that example and explanation in my classes. Am I plagiarising? I am not sure.

One small diversion. The pronunciation is with a soft ‘g’, as in ‘gentle’ and not hard, as in ‘get’. Many of my colleagues, and obviously their students, pronounce it wrong, with a hard ‘g’. My telling them to correct their mistake makes them do exactly the opposite thing – cling to the wrong pronunciation. The irony is the teachers complain that students do not listen to them!

Now, to the main narrative. As far as I have checked, repeating a word or even a phrase from someone else’s work becomes plagiarism only when it is passed off as one’s own. There must be intent to take credit for someone else’s work to invoke plagiarism. If the source is cited, it is not plagiarism.

Now get to my doubt about whether I am plagiarising – unable to recall from where I got the example, and therefore unable to cite it, I am indeed plagiarising.

Am I? I ensure that I mention in the class that the example is not an original thought from me. Am I exonerated from the accusation? I think yes.

We ask our students (undergraduate and post-graduate) to put their project reports through a plagiarism-finder filter and attach the ensuing report, called “Similarity Report” and NOT “Plagiarism Report”, to their project reports.

Here is where I would like to start a discussion. Why did the commercial enterprise not title the result of its finding “Plagiarism Report”? Because it did not want to be drawn into a legal battle! Simple, avoid uncertainty in your bottom line.

Plagiarism includes a phrase “pass them [someone else’s ideas] off as one’s own.” There is definitely intent to cheat. Now come to one of the plagiarism-finders that is applied to the project/research documents produced at my place of work – turnitin (I am not picking on this particular software; please take this as a generic reference to all the other software doing similar tasks).

In the project reports we demand that the students devote a chapter to “Literature Review”. In this the students are required to go through about a dozen technical papers related to the topic of their projects, study them, understand the conclusions drawn by the authors of the papers, accept or question them. We also give a specific format in which the papers must be included in the “REFERENCES” section of the report and also how they are cited in the text wherever appropriate.

Turnitin is very alert in catching the inevitable “Gotcha!”s. The titles of the papers cited in the “Literature Review” segment would definitely correspond word-to-word to the titles of the papers, and so would the journals they appeared in and also the authors. Turnitin is not smart enough to remove these instances from its “Gotcha!” report. So sad.

I have not had any experience with Turnitin, but I am aware that it is up to the person submitting to cut out the portions that will give a high score (like in golf, indicates bad performance) and submit only the rest. This is an invitation to cheat.

While the report does carry the substance the software has evaluated, a reviewer, pressed for time because she has twenty other reports to browse through, would just look at the summary – Oh, less than 10%, OK!

In technical papers specialized words and phrases are used that are, if not impossible, difficult to substitute; even if it can be done, it will kill the smoothness of the narrative. Was that a surprise to you – one looks for a smooth narrative in a technical paper? It should not have been.

For example, “Altered Isaac Newton-Joseph Raphson Procedure” just does not get my blood pumping as much as “Modified Newton-Raphson Method” does. It would get me climbing up the wall or to plug my ears to avoid hearing chalk screeching on the board.

Turnitin is just not smart enough. And, in these times when we are talking about Artificial Intelligence, and Twitter’s algorithms locating hate speech, giving it basic intelligence must not be too much of a problem.

I obviously cannot turn in my report without the cover page. Ha, ha, there starts the problem! I have to put in the name of the institution – chalk one up for similarity; upon its heels comes the phrase “in partial fulfilment of” – oops, two; the month and the year of submission – three. Therefore, there are at least three “plagiarized items” located on the cover page.  It is all downhill from there. And, the heading for a chapter has to be “CHAPTER” – any arguments? I thought not.

I am not here to find fault in the software and its processes. Only to point out that there must be some of the easy steps the vendors of these can incorporate in their product to reduce the opportunity for idiots with time on their hands, like me, to criticize.

And, to the authorities – it is a student paper, being submitted to the university (I am not talking about Ph.D dissertation, mind you). Cut some slack. If the student and her advisor wishes to send it for possible publication later, then focus on the issues like plagiarism, as then there is some possibility of malafide intent.

It is all in the intent. Without intent, there is no plagiarism.

College administrators must make themselves aware of this.

Raghuram Ekambaram