iThenticate Blog

A recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that teachers felt that, while technology has made writing easier to teach, it’s also made student writing less formal and, even more worrisome, led to an increase in plagiarism.

Once it’s published, it’s permanent. This statement was made back in 2008 in a Columbia Journalism Review piece titled “Scrubbing Away their Sins” and it still holds true today. Jack Shafer referred to the same thing in his recent Reuters article on the NPR decision to remove Ahmad Shafi’s article from their website after duplicate content was discovered via a plagiarism check by one of their readers.

iThenticate has launched a search function on its website that identifies journals and content partners that use iThenticate to check for originality and plagiarism through the CrossCheck user community.

The iThenticate comparison database contains millions of items that editors screen against to detect plagiarism and other types of misconduct. By searching on iThenticate.com, visitors can find 70,000+ publications that use iThenticate, and over 30+ million scholarly articles, books and conference proceedings that have been indexed in the iThenticate database.

“The depth and breadth of scholarly content in our comparison database is truly massive,” said Chris Cross, general manager of iThenticate. “So, we have built this search capability as a tool to assist our existing customers as well as those exploring our solution for the first time. It will help them to cull through our content sources more easily and identify the content sources they care most about. For example, a customer that wishes to submit an article for publication to a particular journal can now very quickly determine if that journal uses iThenticate. Or, when submitting a document for comparison, the new search function allows that customer to quickly determine if a particular content source is part of our indexed reference database. This will provide our customers with additional confidence that the documents they are submitting for comparison are being compared against the content sources they care most about.”

Searchers can find journals by name, title or subject. Try searching now!

This news and more were announced in the January 2012 edition of the iThenticate plagiarism newsletter. Sign up for the free newsletter.

Part 2 - Scholarly Publishing - Technological Impact

It’s been only a few months since German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg resigned after being accused of plagiarizing his doctorate. Now two more German politicians have resigned and been stripped of their Ph.D’s as a result of plagiarism.

Last month Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a leading politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), and previously vice president of the European Parliament, was investigated by the The University of Heidelberg for plagiarism in her thesis, revocation of her Ph.D as the final result. According to DW-World.de, 120 passages on 80 different pages from nearly 30 different publications (and two-thirds of those not accurately cited) in her thesis were plagiarized.

Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, also a member of the Free Democrats (FDP), is the latest German politician to be revoked of his doctorate for plagiarism. The faculty at the University of Bonn invested his Ph.D thesis and found enough evidence to revoke the doctorate degree.

All three of these political figures had different excuses to the accusation of plagiarism.

Journals today are faced with the challenge of publishing work that may have been plagiarized. Publishing such work can seriously damage a journal's reputation. Thus, organizations are changing their editorial processes to detect and prevent plagiarism before papers are sent for review.

Laura Miller from Salon recently penned a very enlightening article about the proliferation of ‘E-Book Spam,’ specifically on Amazon’s Kindle E-Reader. Although E-Books are still a relatively new form of content consumption, the medium is already facing the same spam problems that blogs and online publishers have battled with for more than a decade.