Methodology

Citeulike tagging

Final report

Plagiarism in higher education is rarely far from the media’s gaze.  The advent and use of digital technologies, which open up a plethora of useful and credible information for use by students, at the same time expose the risks of uncritical and unacknowledged use of other people’s work. There is wide concern that this has led to an increase in the incidence of plagiarism in higher education (Duggan, 2006; Hart & Friesner, 2004; Maurer, Kappe, & Zaka, 2006; Park, 2003).  

Institutions have met these concerns with the implementation of electronic detection systems (Culwin & Lancaster, 2000; Maurer et al., 2006).  The situation has moved very quickly, from the introduction of the UK national license for Turnitin in 2002/3 to the present situation where this software is used by over 95% of Higher Education Institutions (Barrie, 2008). Electronic detection of plagiarism is one of the most widely spread technologies used in education and the evidence base for its use is only just beginning to yield results. In this fast moving field, there is a need for a comprehensive review of the impact and uses of such electronic detection tools in the UK and beyond.

It has been observed that electronic detection provides a strong deterrent to students (Dahl, 2007). Implementation of electronic detection has varied widely across the sector, with some using detection on only a few suspected cases to all coursework being submitted. Some allow students to submit and resubmit their work for formative purposes, interpreting the resultant reports on the originality of the work themselves (Davies, 2007). Further investigation of this work through the literature will form a valuable evidence for practitioners and policy makers alike. 

This project wil produce a synthesis on the evidence of the effectiveness, use and implementation of plagiarism detection by electronic means ‘Dealing with plagiarism in the digital age’. Those papers cited in the review will be tagged and added to an open online reference sharing system, citeulike. This resource can be shared and added to by anyone interested in this area of research.