The plagiarism allegations first hit Claudine Gay when a right-wing activist published several examples of unattributed text

from

the academic writings of the president of Harvard. Although inadequate attribution wasn’t the only controversy Gay swirled her response around

conference questions about anti-Semitism on campusthe

Israel-Hamas played a much larger role; it was the tipping point that forced her to resign this month.

The next salvo hit Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and the wife of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who had campaigned vigorously for Gay’s ouster. The publication Business Insider reported that several paragraphs and sentences from Oxman’s dissertation appeared to have been lifted from Wikipedia. Oxman apologized for the mistakes on social media.

In response, Ackman wrote on X that he would also join the plagiarism review game. Ackman said his review would include all the published work of MIT’s entire faculty, its president, Sally Kornbluth, and the university’s administrators, plus all the work of the employees at Business Insider, and eventually as well the work of the faculties of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Dartmouth.

Vetting every publication by every academic throughout their career at a major 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 instructors, and iThenticate, a more comprehensive offering favored by academic journal editors.

According to the company, 80% of U.S. students attend schools that use Turnitins software to check student work for plagiarism. This includes 50% of American high school students. Nearly all leading scientific journals use the company’s products to check submitted articles for inappropriate language and missing citations, Caren said. (Turnitins programs only analyze text, he noted, and don’t catch fake numbers, manipulated images or other data-related trickery.)

The widespread adoption of plagiarism detection software in higher education over the past decade means that the prospect of a plagiarism check is not much of a threat to most graduates under the age of around 30. Their essays, papers, theses and dissertations were almost certainly vetted in this way when they submitted them.

But for older academics, subjecting work to software scrutiny could reveal intentional or unintentional attribution errors that have never been exposed before.

And that’s what a small but highly motivated sector of Turnitin’s customer base is counting on.

We allow anyone to use these media organizations and political groups, Caren said of Turnitin’s products. If there are other companies that want to look into someone’s past, it’s the same technology, just used by people we didn’t design it for in the first place.

Plagiarism charges have brought down Harvard’s president. A conservative attack fueled outrage

The National Science Foundation describes plagiarism as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving proper credit.” Harvard and MIT define it in similar terms in their academic integrity guidelines.

It can be devastating, especially in academia.

“People get jobs, grants, and a litany of other opportunities based on their research, which by default is assumed to be original to them. If it later turns out that this is not the case, it would mean that they were effectively given these opportunities. about fraud,” said Christian Moriarty, professor of ethics and law at St. Petersburg College in Florida.

That is why “an accusation, unfounded or not, undermines their authority and position,” he said.

No one has accused Gay or Oxman of stealing high-level data or ideas. But some of their published works appear to contain explanatory sentences and paragraphs that closely follow the language in the sources available at the time, the kind of plagiarism that software can most easily detect.

Gay’s accusers highlighted multiple examples of prose that reflected other sources. For example, two paragraphs in her 1997 dissertation closely matched text in an article by researchers who were not cited anywhere in the article. Harvard said Gay requested corrections to some works.

In Oxman’s case, Business Insider identified fifteen non-consecutive paragraphs in her 2010 dissertation that closely resemble the language appearing in Wikipedia articles at the time. Most are definitions of technical terms and concepts. The publication also found passages in her research papers that reflected other sources.

We found 95 cases of plagiarism in a new book by USC scholars. Sales have been suspended

Neither Christopher Rufo, the activist who first made accusations 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 to 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 committed plagiarism.

in

his dissertation, a major political scandal in that country that led to the downfall of the top politician in 2011.

While Feedback Studio is only available to institutions, iThenticate can be licensed by anyone. The program digests the text of a book, research paper or article in minutes and returns a detailed report that highlights the percentage of sentences and passages in the document

That

correspond to publications online and in Turnitin’s scientific journal database.

The report must be checked by a human to rule out legitimate use of quoted material. Although the process is time-consuming, it is much faster than an equally thorough review would have been conducted in a pre-digital era.

It’s easier to look for plagiarism than ever before,” says Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant in New Orleans. “The easier something is to do, the more people are likely to do it.

The idea of ​​using plagiarism accusations as a means to discredit rivals existed long before the invention of plagiarism checking software, says Sam Bruton, director of the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Southern Mississippi.

People have always had the ability to make accusations of scientific integrity because of ultimate motives, whether those motives were personal (resentment, spite), political or something else, Bruton wrote in an email.

He disputed the idea that the software’s distribution is primarily responsible for an increase in plagiarism accusations, attributing it instead to the hyperpoliticization that has engulfed so many American institutions.

But many educators and academics who use such programs in their daily work said it was disheartening to see them used for political purposes.

The technology is designed to support instructors and help enforce proper citation guidelines, said Moriarty, who teaches other professors how to use such tools.

Academic integrity practitioners often dislike, don’t appreciate, or think it’s appropriate to use academic integrity software as a means of punishment, Moriarty says.

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Plagiarism detection software cannot determine how or why language similar to other sources appears in an author’s work, whether the issue violates an institutional code of ethics, or what the consequences of such a violation should be.

For now, only humans can do that.

Human expertise is essential to maintaining the integrity of scientific and academic work, says Greer Murphy, director of academic honesty at the University of Rochester’s College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering in New York. But that’s always been the case: the sophistication of modern technology hasn’t changed things.