Detecting plagiarism

Editor—The widespread availability of medical articles on the internet has made plagiarism a common practice among some students.¹ Most plagiarisers are keen to find short cuts—hence the popularity of cutting and pasting text from the internet rather than laboriously copying from textbooks or articles. This habit, however, makes it easy to identify the cheats.

A favourite trick of mine is to identify plagiarism using the Google search engine. I do this by taking a random piece of text from their work of about six words in length and pasting it into the Google search engine between quotation marks. Although I usually choose a section of text that includes a name or unusual phrase, a search of any sentence plagiarised from the internet will bring up the original work.

Over the past three years I have done this on all pieces of work that have made me suspicious and have a 75% success rate in identifying the original work. So far, the offenders have all been identified at an early stage of their work. I met with them and, after hearing them state that the work was their own, I demonstrated how I found the original work using Google. This embarrassment, along with a warning, has been enough to prevent a repeat. In the light of Chalmers's experience, however, maybe I am being overoptimistic about the effect of this learning experience on them.

A useful addition to universities' websites would be the ability to Google search the subscription only journals. This would allow editors to Google check for plagiarism before publication in a matter of minutes.