Accusations of plagiarism first hit Claudine Gay when a right-wing activist published several examples of unattributed text from the Harvard president's academic writings. Although underattribution was not the only controversy swirling around Gay (her response to congressional questions about anti-Semitism on campus played a much larger role), it was the tipping point that forced his resignation this month.
The next volley hit Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and wife of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who had campaigned vigorously for Gay's ouster. The Business Insider publication reported that several paragraphs and sentences in Oxman's dissertation appeared to have been lifted from Wikipedia. ox He apologized for errors on social networks.
In response, Ackman wrote in X that he would also be getting into the plagiarism checking game. Ackman said his review would cover all published work by all MIT professors, its president, Sally Kornbluth, and members of the university's board of trustees, plus all the work of the staff on Business Insider, and possibly also the work of the faculties of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth.
“Examining every publication by every scholar throughout their career at a large university like Harvard would take thousands of hours,” Chris Caren said.
He would know. Caren is the CEO of Oakland-based Turnitin, the world's largest provider of academic integrity software. The company's products include Feedback Studio, a program designed for high school and college teachers, and iThenticate, a more rigorous offering preferred by academic journal editors.
Students work in the computer lab at Cuyama Valley High School in New Cuyama, California.
(Christine Armario/Associated Press)
According to the company, 80% of American college students attend schools that use Turnitin software to check students' work for plagiarism. The same is true for 50% of high school students in the United States. Nearly all major academic journals use the company's products to check submitted articles for inappropriate language and missing citations, Caren said. (Turnitin's programs analyze only text, she noted, and do not detect manipulated figures, manipulated images or other data-related tricks.)
The widespread adoption of plagiarism detection software in higher education over the past decade means that the prospect of a “plagiarism check” for most college graduates under 30 is not much of a threat. It is almost certain that your essays, articles, theses, and dissertations were examined in this way when you submitted them.
But for older academics, subjecting work to software's level of scrutiny could well reveal attribution errors (intentional or not) that have never before come to light.
And that's what a small but highly motivated sector of Turnitin's customer base is counting on.
“We allow anyone to use them: media organizations, political groups,” Caren said of Turnitin's products. “If there are other companies that want to investigate someone's past, it's the same technology, it's just used by people we didn't design it for in the first place.”
The National Science Foundation describes plagiarism as “the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.” Harvard and MIT define it in similar language in their academic integrity guidelines.
Particularly in academia, it can be a devastating burden.
“People get jobs, grants, and a litany of other opportunities based on their research that, by default, is assumed to be original to them. If it is later discovered that this is not the case, it would be saying that they effectively obtained these opportunities through fraud,” said Christian Moriarty, professor of ethics and law at St. Petersburg College in Florida.
That is why “an accusation, unfounded or not, undermines his authority and his position,” he said.
No one has accused Gay or Oxman of stealing high-level data or ideas. But some of his published works appear to contain expository sentences and paragraphs that closely match the language of the sources available at the time—the type of plagiarism that software can most easily detect.
Gay's accusers highlighted multiple examples of prose that echoed other sources. For example, two paragraphs of his 1997 doctoral thesis accurately reflected the text of an article by researchers who were not cited anywhere in the article. Harvard said Gay requested corrections to some of the works.
In Oxman's case, Business Insider identified 15 non-consecutive paragraphs in his 2010 dissertation that closely resemble language that appeared in Wikipedia articles at the time. Most are definitions of technical terms and concepts. The publication also found passages in its research articles that echoed other sources.
Neither Christopher Rufo, the activist who first raised allegations against Gay, nor Business Insider revealed what software they used to identify the problematic text.
Turnitin programs were used to discover that parts of Melania Trump's 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention matched Michelle Obama's 2008 remarks at the Democratic National Convention, Caren said.
The CEO said he also believes the company's software was used to determine that former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had plagiarized his doctoral thesis, a massive political scandal in that country that led to the downfall of the star politician in 2011.
Although Feedback Studio is only available to institutions, anyone can license iThenticate. The program digests the text of a book, research paper or article in minutes and returns a detailed report marking the percentage of phrases and passages in the document that match those published online and in Turnitin's academic journal database. .
The report must be reviewed by a person to rule out legitimate uses of the cited material. Although the process is time-consuming, it is much faster than a similarly comprehensive review would have required in a pre-digital era.
“It's easier than ever to search for plagiarism,” said Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant in New Orleans. “The easier it is to do something, the more likely people are to do it.”
It's easier than ever to check for plagiarism. The easier it is to do something, the more likely people will do it.
— Jonathan Bailey, copyright and plagiarism consultant
The idea of using plagiarism accusations as a means to discredit rivals existed long before the invention of plagiarism-checking software, said Sam Bruton, director of the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Southern Mississippi.
“People have always had the ability to raise accusations of academic integrity for ulterior motives, whether personal (grudges, resentments), political, or something else,” Bruton wrote in an email.
He disputed the idea that the spread of software is primarily responsible for the rise in plagiarism accusations, attributing it instead “to the hyperpoliticization that has engulfed so many American institutions.”
But many educators and academics who use these programs in their daily work said seeing them used for political purposes has been disheartening.
The technology is designed to support instructors and help enforce proper citation guidelines, said Moriarty, who teaches other instructors how to use such tools.
“People in the academic integrity field often don't like, appreciate, or think it's appropriate to use academic integrity software as a means of punishing for the sake of punishing,” Moriarty said.
Plagiarism detection software cannot determine how or why language similar to other sources appeared in an author's work, whether the topic violates an institution's code of ethics, or what the consequences of such a violation should be.
At least for now, only humans can do that.
“Human experience is essential to maintaining the integrity of academic and scholarly work,” said Greer Murphy, director of academic honesty at the College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering at the University of Rochester in New York. “But that has always been true: the sophistication of modern technology has not changed things.”
