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a.k.a. Anti-plagiarism
Thesis seminar lectures, Nov 24th, 2016
Martti Tolvanen
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* Knowledge does not exist in isolation
* but it is related to previous knowledge
* Science is a process of creating new knowledge
* Hypothesis: an assumption of how something might
be
* Hypothesis testing: experiments or data analysis
* Theory: a larger, consistent framework of proven
and unproven hypotheses
* When writing, you need to make clear how your
work relates to previous theories and tradition
*
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* How to give credit to previous work:
* References to publications
* How do we know that previous work is valid?
* Peer review: other scientists review the
manuscripts for journal articles
* Books: highly esteemed authors and/or editors
* How do you select each reference?
* Try to find the most original statement and/or
experiment to support what your text says
*
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* Plagiarism: representing somebody else’s ideas or
work as your work
* Very rare and hard to do at experiment level
* Easy to do at the level of writing
* But: what is copying, what is paraphrasing?
* Self-plagiarism: repeating your own results or text
* Ok in ”review articles”
* Ok in specific situations
* Expanding MSc thesis into PhD thesis
*
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* Science is competitive
* ”Publish or Perish”
* Reports and rumors circulate of people stealing
data and ideas from another research group
* and publishing the results first
* = intellectual theft
* Normally science is collaborative and open
* But you should be aware of which of your
”competitors” are considered hostile and which are
friendly
*
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* What is the degree of acceptable imitation in text?
* In some cultures changing somebody else’s words is
seen as disrespect
* In the European tradition of science, exact quotes
are avoided
* What is acceptable in actual work?
* Repeating an experiment with small modifications:
validation or plagiarism?
* Is it more acceptable if the original experiment was
yours or somebody else’s?
*
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* In writing, it’s important that you develop your
original approach and/or outline
* Do not follow somebody else’s train of thought
for very long
* Whenever you state specific scientific facts,
they should be backed by references
* Unless ”textbook-level” or ”everybody knows”
* You should write in your own words
* paraphrasing
*
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* Starting from Jan 2013 (PhD theses) and Aug
2013 (MSc theses) every thesis at the U of
Turku requires a check for originality
* After the check, you will be required to
include this text at the bottom of the title
page:
* ”The originality of this thesis has been checked
in accordance with the University of Turku
quality assurance system using the Turnitin
OriginalityCheck service.”
*
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* The selected tool for anti-plagiarism check:
Turnitin
* Market leader, used widely
* Including U of Turku and U of Tampere
* The student submits his/her text in the system
* Interface in Moodle, actual check in the
Turnitin servers
* Your text is checked against a huge database of
existing texts
*
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* Output: a report in which all detected
similarities are highlighted
* Most similarities are insignificant
* The service is trained to note small insertions or
deletions, or even changes in word order, so even
many well paraphrased ideas are highlighted
* Scientific text can not avoid the repetition of
precise terms
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* What was not quite right in the previous
example?
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* My opinions
* Lazy writing, follows quite closely the original
* Well paraphrased, though
* Citation not shown together with the statements
* What you couldn’t see
* Comparison to a non-academic publication?
* (Women's Health Weekly, Oct 9 2008)
*
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* What I didn’t see at the time of the check (and
neither did TurnItIn)
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* Further opinions?
* Did the Women’s Health author plagiarize the
article abstract more heavily than the thesis
writer?
*
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* The original article was properly cited a bit
later
*
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