IF YOU believe the newspapers, plagiarism is on the rise. Hardly a month goes by without a report of an author “borrowing” from someone else’s book, a scientist claiming credit for another’s idea, or students completing their essays with passages downloaded from the internet. Some blame the Google generation, alleging a cut-and-paste mentality and hazy notions of ownership.
In fact, plagiarism is becoming a lot harder – for students at least. Many universities in Europe and the US have started using software packages that detect similarities between, say, an essay and existing documents. The best known, called Turnitin, uses a set of algorithms to create a digital fingerprint of a piece of text, which it then compares to the fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of texts in a database. Web crawlers also scour the internet for matches. At the end the program produces an “originality report”, complete with source links. Coventry University in the UK found 237 students guilty of cheating this year using Turnitin. It has expelled seven of them, and 12 more cases are pending.
Surely, though, some plagiarism is unintentional and doesn’t deserve to be punished in this way. Take the case of Helen Keller (1880-1968), the bestselling deaf-blind American author and activist. As a child she wrote a story called The Frost King that was allegedly plagiarised from another children’s tale, The Frost Fairies by Margaret Canby. It turned out that Keller had remembered the story after it had been read to her some years earlier, and mistakenly attributed it to her own creativity. The scandal nearly put her off writing for good. In recent years there has been a flurry of similar cases in which novelists acknowledged that they had “internalised” and unwittingly borrowed passages from books they had read.
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Unintentional plagiarism is known as cryptomnesia and is a recognised condition, though poorly understood. In 1993, psychologist Marcia Johnson, then at Princeton University, and colleagues suggested that people commonly forget where they have learned information, making them likely to misattribute it at a later date (Psychological Bulletin, vol 114, p 3). People have even been known to plagiarise themselves in this way. This is unsurprising: research on non-conscious memory shows people can continue using a skill even if they’ve forgotten that they learned it.
“People commonly forget where they learned information”
With the help of software like Turnitin, it should be relatively easy to distinguish intentional from unintentional plagiarism in most cases. As memory specialist Larry Jacoby of Washington University in St Louis points out, a person is unlikely to be able to regurgitate large chunks of text verbatim without remembering the source. When a general idea is being copied rather than actual words, intentionality becomes harder to determine. Then again, as Mark Twain pointed out in the letter he wrote in defence of Keller, all literature is plagiarised anyhow.