Plagiarism means something different now

Scott R. Nelson, writing in the Chronicle Review, says that plagiarism means something different in the search-engine era. Before electronic cut and paste, before photocopiers, reproducing scholarly work word for word was hard and time consuming, he writes. That led to paraphrasing and summaries that often distorted meaning.

Technology makes the perfect (at the word level at least) copy a reality. That makes it easy to trace the plagiarists because professors "can word-search a string of sentence on Google as well as anyone." So plagiarists today simply have to move a few sentences around, change a few words, make their stolen passages search-engine untraceable.

But Nelson says at the end of his short essay that the true scholars, the ones who respect the material and respect their students and peers enough to read with care, will still be able to sniff out the rotten works, even the disguised works.

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