Thursday, April 1, 2010

Preventing Plagiarism

Janet Stemwedel, blogging at "Adventures in Ethics and Science", discusses a paper on preventing plagiarism:

Bilic-Zulle, L., Azman, J., Frkovic, V., & Petrovecki, M. (2008). Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing? Science and Engineering Ethics, 14 (1), 139-147 DOI: 10.1007/s11948-007-9037-2
The authors discuss plagiarism detected in papers written in Croatian in a medical school program, and note that the amount of plagiarism dropped significantly when the students were informed that their papers would be checked by software.

Psychological warfare works, apparently. The question is, how long until people end up just buying ghostwritten papers?