Publication: The Mercury Issued: Date: 2007-08-02 Reporter: Matthew Savides

Software Aims to Detect Copied Work

 

Publication 

The Mercury
Date

2007-08-02

Reporter

Matthew Savides

Web Link

www.themercury.co.za

 

Universities step up fight against plagiarism

Plagiarism has reached such proportions at tertiary institutions that drastic measures - including the development of software designed to detect plagiarised work - have been put in place.

Speaking at the Durban University of Technology yesterday, the University of KZN's Deputy Vice-chancellor of Research, Knowledge Production and Partnership, Prof Ahmed Bawa, said it was no longer possible to trust the integrity of senior researchers because of the amount of plagiarism taking place.

"This problem is not confined to UKZN or South Africa, it is a global problem. It is not a new problem. The history of science and knowledge production is littered with cases of plagiarism," said Bawa.

The university has been in the spotlight as a result of high-profile plagiarism accusations, one of which involved former lecturer Chippy Shaik. The allegations were that Shaik, aided by his supervisor, Viktor Verijenko, had plagiarised his mechanical engineering doctorate.

Both denied the charges.

Another high-profile case involved the university's former chief financial officer, Prof Kanthan Pillay, who was dismissed amid questions over the awarding of his master's of commerce degree.

Bawa said plagiarism was committed by students, lecturers, professors and academics, illustrating how widespread it had become. It was possible, he said, that increased pressure on academics to do research and have their work published was behind the explosion in plagiarism.

This pressure came from the individuals themselves and from universities, with many academics being forced to publish at least one piece of research a year.

'Sloppiness'

Bawa said that programmes, such as the university's Research Awards Programme, which allocated money for research at the university based on published work, was also increasing pressure on researchers. It was not clear how beneficial such projects were. However, they could lead to plagiarism, and this should be balanced against its benefits, he said.

Other pressures, including expectations from the government and private companies to publish important research, were also prominent.

Despite the pressures, said Bawa, it was often "sloppiness and laziness" *1 that were the biggest problems.

He said that academic freedom was enshrined in the constitution because it was important that research was done by South African people on their own issues. "We do not want to have other people tell us about ourselves when they don't understand our context and, therefore, when any researcher plagiarises, it seriously undermines society and is a fundamental breach of trust."

Universities needed to find ways to determine if documents had been plagiarised to curb the problem, Bawa said. One method was to use software that compared the text in research papers to thousands of previously published works *2 and determined whether portions, large or small, had been stolen.

"Plagiarism is a very serious problem. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be such software because there would be no market for it. There is just so much published these days that it is impossible for the assessor to read everything *3 that has been published. So we have to use technology like this," said Bawa.

Universities should have good governance systems in place to deal with plagiarism, he said. A university had to be in position to deal swiftly and ruthlessly with plagiarism when it was brought to the fore.

Matthew Savides <matthew.savides@inl.co.za>

With acknowledgements to Matthew Savides and The Mercury.


*1       Nonsense - sloppiness and laziness are orthogonal issues to plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the theft of the intellectual property of others and is committed either because the plagiariser wants to gain a benefit (like money) from the theft or (more often than not) is too incompetent to create their own knowledge.

In the latter case the plagiariser steals from the entire community because the community bestows upon the plagiariser  certain attributes which are false.

Actually a plagiariser should be meticulous about presentation because sloppiness and laziness can (and should) easily lead to special attention from the whole spectrum of reviewers.

For example, when one finds over 130 presentation errors in a 200 page doctoral thesis, then even a lay person can conclude that the supervisors and examiners are not doing their job properly - or at all.


*2      The problem is that such comparative material must be in digital form and in the same language.

There is just so much existing material published prior to widespread digitisation and in other languages (primarily in Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Portugese).

It is such a simple matter to source published material and either translate it or optical character read (OCR) it and use it without due acknowledgement and pass it off as one's own.


*3      This is only true for undergraduate reports and possibly at honours level.

In higher degrees, especially masters and doctorates (PhDs), the buck simply stops with the examiners and supervisors, who if they are worth their salt, should be aware of nearly all published knowledge in the field in which they are qualified to act as examiners and supervisors.