In the article titled ‘Plagiarism: The Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V boom’ found in BBC Magazine (2011), by looking at the action of plagiarizing of the German Defence Minister, Colonel Gaddafi, which results in his resignation, the author(s) indicate(s) that the problem of plagiarism has become more serious than ever in the era of technology.
The article mainly mentions the advantage of the Internet which offers extremely useful searching tools such as Google, Bing, Yahoo… for Internet users to duplicate and to fabricate the other’s works. By changing the pronouns and nouns from singular to plural, or cutting off some parts of the speeches, the users has easily made other people’s researches become their own works. In this case, the experiences of teachers play as key roles in recognizing the cues of plagiarism by noticing sudden variety of voice used by students ‘from good language to bad, from academic tone to journalistic tone’. Besides, some detecting programs, for examples Turnitin and SafeAssign, are utilized to assess the level of similarity between student’s papers and the online databases, web pages, essays… by universities as a solution to cope with the global issue – plagiarism - which tends to increase significantly with access to digitized information in recent years (Park, cited by Sutherland-Smith 2008).
Moreover, as argued as Mark Lucas (BBC, ibid), plagiarism is not only a cancer in academic environment but also in journalism fields. For instance, a paragraph written by blogger Josh Marshall was used virtually word-by-word by the columnist of New York Times, Maureen Dowd without attribution. As an excuse by the journalist, she claimed it was an unintentional mistake as she just wrote about a story which she has heard from a friend. Therefore, journalists have to consider the principles of ethical authorship and publishing carefully whenever they start writing in order to avoid the same errors happening to the Pulitzer Prize winner, Maureen Dowd.
In relation to the principle of publishing, Annilee Game and Micheal West (2002) recommend that the authors should not submit the same or similar works which had been published elsewhere to other outlets. When the works of other people are lifted, either directly from the texts or paraphrasing, together with the ideas which were not conceived by the authors, the sources must be credited properly in the paper. Consequently, the situation of duplicate publications and plagiarism could be prevented from existing.
References list:
1. BBC Magazine 2011, Plagiarism: The Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V boom, last viewed 5th May 2011, < http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12613617 >.
2. Game, A & West, MA 2002, ‘Principles of Publishing’, The Psychologist, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 126 – 129.
3. Sutherland-Smith, W 2008, Plagiarism the internet and student learning: improving academic integrity, Taylor and Francis, New York.
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