September 5, 2005
Software Strives to Spot Plagiarism Before Publication
By TANIA RALLI
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/technology/05plagiarism.html?pagewanted=print
After a series of damaging newspaper scandals involving plagiarism in
recent years, a new piece of software looks to help editors stop wrongdoers
before their articles go to print.
The LexisNexis data collection service has introduced CopyGuard, a program
aimed at exposing plagiarists or spotting copyright infringement. According
to John Barrie, chief executive of iParadigms, the company that developed
the program with LexisNexis, CopyGuard can generate a report that
calculates the percentage of material suspected of not being original,
highlights that text and pinpoints its possible original source, all within
seconds.
"We take digital fingerprints of individual documents and compare them to
the digital fingerprints of existing documents," said Mr. Barrie.
Existing programs from iParadigm and others have focused on plagiarism by
students, not journalists. CopyGuard, which is available by subscription
(the company would not divulge the price of the service) draws on
LexisNexis's database of more than six billion documents and several years'
worth of Web pages archived by iParadigm. In addition to checking newspaper
and magazine articles, CopyGuard can be used by publishers to scan book
manuscripts.
"It should be that these institutions want to deter their problem before it
happens," Mr. Barrie said. He said that CopyGuard would have caught
plagiarism by Jayson Blair, a former reporter for The New York Times, and
disputed passages in works by historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns
Goodwin. (The Times cooperated in the development of the software but is
not currently a customer, according to a Times spokesman, Toby Usnik.)
Last year, Carolyn Lumsden, the editorial page editor of The Hartford
Courant, used a similar program, developed by iParadigms, to vet the
submissions of nonjournalists writing for the paper's opinion pages. She
said she used it because some contributors did not realize copying and
pasting from other sources was unacceptable.
"The feeling was people outside the newsroom don't know newspaper norms,"
she said.
Debashis Aikat, an associate professor of journalism at the University of
North Carolina, praised the use of checks and balances in newsrooms but
speculated that the cunning plagiarist could still sidestep the archived
materials. "You really cannot have software that can cover everything, but
this is a step in the right direction."
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
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