INTRODUCTION

Academic plagiarism is a thorny ethical and practical problem. Perhaps readers have never personally encountered or recognized a case of plagiarism so its immediate interest and relevance may be obscure. The Internet is an invaluable tool for researchers and certainly also a source of inspiration. However, never before has it been so easy to plagiarise the work of others.[1] 

PLAGIARISM DEFINED

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to "plagiarize" means
1) to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
2) to use (another's production) without crediting the source
3) to commit literary theft
4) to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.

Plot of the number of articles on Pubmed carrying 'Plagiarism'  [Click on image to enlarge]

The St. Martin's Handbook defines plagiarism as "the use of someone else's words or ideas as [the writer's] own without crediting the other person" (Lunsford and Connors 602).

In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward.

HOW & WHY

Medline[2] is an example of a tool providing huge amounts of information at the click of the 'search' bar. Other internet search engines such as Yahoo![3], Google, [4] AltaVista [5]provide hits on any conceivable subject. Each month about 25 million users of the World Wide Web (WWW) access information from Yahoo! At an average rate of 50 million web pages per day - a larger audience than magazines such as Newsweek or Time.[6] 
According to a survey by the Psychological Record 36% of undergraduates have admitted to plagiarizing written material. [7] Students and researchers find it even easier to get away with the attitude taken by the academic community : "Who wants to sit around looking for websites trying to find out if a paper is plagiarized or not... pretty soon you're a private investigator." -- a Stanford University professor, from an article in TechWeb News.[8]

Before the Internet, cheating was time consuming and potential plagiarists had to find appropriate works from a limited pool of resources, usually a nearby library, and copy them by hand. Since these resources were almost always professionally written, the risk of detection was very high. With the Internet, a simple 'Cut… Copy…. Paste…. ' will do the job. Moreover, the threshold of stealing ideas, whether lifting paragraphs or perhaps even whole articles from the Internet, seems to be much lower than copying sections from books or articles.[1]

A CASE STUDY

On 5 August 1999, a paper titled "The quality of surgical information on the Internet" (see figure below) was published in the Journal of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (JRCSEd)[1]. The JRCSEd is a journal indexed in several bibliographical databases including Biological Abstracts, EMBASE, Current Contents, Index Medicus/MEDLINE, and others. After publication, it was determined that more than one third (36%) of this article consisted of phrases that were directly copied from multiple websites, without giving attribution to this fact. [9,1]

The online version of the questionable article, which contained lifted phrases from the web, as published in the Journal of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh [Click on image to enlarge]

CRACKING DOWN

Yet, all is not bleak. In order to detect plagiarism, one may copy-paste the matter (or a part of it) in the search window at Findsame.[10] This search engine turns up a list of Web pages that have sentences or whole paragraphs matching your entry. Alternatively, one may type some keywords or unusual phrases from the assignment into any of the search engines like Google[4] or Alta Vista[5]. This would usually turn up the source document, as students usually look for information this way. Plagarized.com[11] is a forum for educators concerned about Internet plagiarism. Though rather US-oriented, Indian academicians too would find the articles and advice on the site very useful. Turn It In[12] is a paid service that gives a "document source analysis" for a given assignment. This program checks its local database containing thousands of academic papers, as well as searches the Web for possible matches. It then gives an "originality report" with complete colour-coded links for each paper. Word Check Systems[13] is a unique software that allows you to create an archive of papers, journals and assignments submitted in the past. When you enter a suspect document into it, the program scans the entire database and brings up matching documents, if any. The Internet can also provide ways and means to identify unintentional omissions of attributions and for journal editors and peer-reviewers to detect plagiarism.[12]

TIPS TO AVOID COMMITING PLAGIARISM

	Cite every piece of information that is not a) the result of your own research, or b) common knowledge. This includes opinions, arguments, and speculations as well as facts, details, figures, and statistics.
	Use quotation marks every time you use the author's words. (For longer quotes, indenting the whole quotation has the same effect as quotation marks.)
	At the beginning of the first sentence in which you quote, paraphrase, or summarize, make it clear that what comes next is someone else's idea:           · According to Smith...           · Jones says...           · In his 1987 study, Robinson proved...
	At the end of the last sentence containing quoted, paraphrased, or summarized material, insert a parenthetical citation to show where the material came from:

(Notice the use of brackets to mark a change in the wording of the original.) [14]


REFERENCES

1. Eysenbach G. Report of a case of cyberplagiarism - and reflections on detecting and preventing academic misconduct using the Internet.J Med Internet Res 2000:1;e4 [Full Text Online at:http://www.jmir.org/2000/1/e4/index.htm]
2. Medline [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/]
3. Yahoo! [http://www.yahoo.com/]
4. Google [http://www.google.com/]
5. AltaVista [http://www.altavista.com/]
6. Yahoo!'s U.S. Audience Surpasses 25 Million, Outpacing Leading Broadcast and Print Media. 1997 Nov. [http://www.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release131.html]
7. Roig M. Psychological Record. 1997;47:113-122
8. Plagiarism On The Web Is As Easy As 1-2-3 , September 9, 1999
[http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/backtoschool/TWB19990909S0003]
9. McKinley J, Cattermole H, Oliver CW. The quality of surgical information on the Internet. J R Coll Surg Edinb. 1999 Aug;44(4):265-8. [Medline Abstracts] 
10. Findsame [http://www.findsame.com]
11. Plagiarized.com [http://www.plagiarized.com/]
12. TurnItIn [http://www.turnitin.com/]
13. Word Check Systems [http://www.wordchecksystems.com/]
14. Some tips for avoiding accidental plagiarism when you use sources: Avoiding Plagiarism [http://www.writing.nwu.edu/tips/plag.html]