iThenticate Blog

We recently had the opportunity to chat with Editor-in-Chief Raymond Hammond of the New York Quarterly Magazine, a publication that Rolling Stone has called "The most important poetry magazine in America", about his thoughts on plagiarism and his experience with iThenticate.

Washington Post spokesman Patrick Pexton recently wrote an article about plagiarism within the Post, as well as the organization’s attitude towards dealing with it.  More specifically, Pexton shed light on an instance of plagiarism from the Post’s travel section on April 17^th that originated from a hired freelancer.

Pexton expounds on the topic of freelancer plagiarism, saying:

One thing often said about rumors or slander is that once the information is leaked, it’s out permanently. In other words, even if a rumor is proven to be completely false, the information still exists in the minds of all the people who already heard it.

It might sound like some sort of league of superheroes, but not everyone is keen on the so called ‘plagiarism hunters.’  

The search marketing world has been in a frenzy over Google’s recent ‘Panda’ update.  The Panda release involved modifying some of the underlying mechanisms of Google’s search algorithm – the result has been a benefit to some websites and a hindrance to others. Google’s primary goal with the Panda release was to place less importance on ‘content farms’ that regularly produced unoriginal material.

One of the big benefits of Panda is that websites that publish plagiarized materials regularly should be taking a big hit.  

It’s pretty common that the younger generation gets blamed for plagiarism. Many people see a bunch of kids who grew up on the internet, mashing up You Tube videos and engaging in a cut-and-paste free for all with no regard for ‘journalistic integrity.’ There is definitely an argument to be made that a ‘free-wheeling’ internet culture has been a thorn in the side of proper citations and giving attribution where it’s due.

However, lately it seems that lapses of ethical judgment have been falling on the venerated professionals who have been entrenched in their respective industries for decades.  This was most recently illustrated with the case of Sari Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist who outright plagiarized from other news sources due to the ‘deadline pressure’ she was facing.

We’ve covered a vast array of plagiarism in the news, ranging from cases in politics, research, journalism and academia.