To Use Or Not To Use: Plagiarism Checker

amergina said:

I don't. There's no reason for me to do that, as I don't copy other people's work.

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This.

Oh ... wait.

-cb

Hey you know what they say...

"Good artists borrow. Great artists change a word or two and pretend it was their idea all along."
-Me

Shadow_Ferret said:

I just suggested how.

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But can you show a case where this actually happened. Plagiarism demands using almost the exact wording. If you do this, you'll remember.

I tried a fresh blog post, and the checker reported that it proably was plagiarized, and the url whence it came was the address of my blog. That tells me that it searches the internet, and I wasn't surprised that there weren't any other candidates for sources.

No, I've never considered doing this. Is it even that easy for a fiction writer to do? I know about programs such as Turnitin, but those are intended more for academic use. It's also much easier to plagiarize in academic papers because it can be very easy for students to find phrases or paragraphs in other papers or on Wikipedia that apply well to what they're writing about. There are also students who don't intend to plagiarize, necessarily, but who fail to cite stuff properly.

The chances of accidental plagiarism, especially with fiction, are pretty low.

Huh? Accidental plagiarism? The only time I've seen or heard of this happening happening is when students (or someone else) writing research papers forget to cite their references or do so improperly. I've used programs like turn it in for my students' papers, but to be honest, the plagiarism I'm checking for there isn't the accidental kind. It's useful for flagging papers or passages within papers that have been lifted verbatim from other works that are available online and are in their databases. It's not so great for finding papers purchased from term paper mills.

How does this come into fiction? Are you asking whether I check to see if some paragraph or scene I've written is exactly the same as a scene or paragraph from someone else's book? What are the odds of that happening?

Are you saying that this is actually a thing? That the chimpanzee sitting at my keyboard could accidentally recreate a passage from, say, Hamlet without meaning to?

amergina said:

I don't. There's no reason for me to do that, as I don't copy other people's work.

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X1000.

You want to be a good writer, use your own words. It's a hell of a lot more satisfying than even the remotest drift into plagiarismland.

caw

I don't see what the purpose of one of these programs would be for an honest writer. It would be extraordinary rare to accidentally plagiarize another fiction writer.

From a programming perspective, though, I'm curious how such programs work.

At some point in the code it must define that a certain number of consecutive words strung together constitutes plagiarism, right? How many consecutive words is that?

There's plenty of stock phrases we all use in spoken and written language. Some words strung together are more common than others, esp. in dialog.

for instance...

"What are you doing?"
"What are you doing tomorrow?"
"What are you doing tomorrow night?"
"What are you doing tomorrow night after dinner?"

I can't imagine any of these sentences being flagged as plagiarism.


Here's another example...

"It was the best of times."

I don't think that's not plagiarism either. It's cliche, but not plagiarism.


...but this is obviously from Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."


...and finally this.

"These are the best of times, these are the worst of times."


Is that plagiarism? In my mind it is. If I saw this line in a work of fiction I'd trash it immediately.

What's the determining factor in these programs? Anybody got a clue?

I'm not even sure I could commit plagiarism from memory, even if I tried. I don't think I remember any story well enough to actually plagiarize it. I could probably come close enough to be accused of being a copycat, but that's it.

Accidental plagiarism just isn't going to happen. It is, however, possible to be an accidental copycat, I think, but I doubt any plagiarism checker could determine this because the great majority of the words and phrases would be different, and only the plot would be the same.

To everybody who has used the words "but", "the", "and", and "I" in their posts, expect to hear from my lawyers.

BenPanced said:

To everybody who has used the words "but", "the", "and", and "I" in their posts, expect to hear from my lawyers.

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I'm not too worried, but you may sue anyway. Even if you win, you will have to find a way to collect, and my countersuit may win instead.

O.J. Simpson tried to Trademark "OJ", but it was turned down, because people had been using it in reference to orange juice for a long time.

PandaMan said:

What's the determining factor in these programs? Anybody got a clue?

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My husband used one of these during his university days. I don't know exactly what criteria the programmers used, but there was some leeway in reading the results. You'd feed the paper into this program and it would spit out a percentage, "This paper is 3% plagiarized, or 90% plagiarized, or whatever."

Since the program couldn't analyze how the words were being used within the paper, any matching string of words would increase the percentage (including any quoted excerpts). The program had a field day with works-cited pages: it would pick out the longer titles, strings of authors' names, all that kind of stuff. Therefore, a properly-cited paper never came back at 0%.

I don't remember the cutoff, but the teachers took this into account and told the students to make sure their plagiarism percentage remained below a certain level (3% or 5% if I recall).

The program also highlighted the offending passages, so it was easy to determine if it was an actual case of plagiarism or simply the sort of stuff mentioned above.

One of my husband's classmates got nailed when her paper came back as 97% plagiarized. There's no way a number that high would have occurred by chance. It turned out she copied most of it off some website. I guess maybe she didn't believe the teacher when he said that he'd be running things through the checker? Maybe she didn't know the checker searched the internet as well as the school database? Who knows.

davidwestergaard said:

"Good artists borrow. Great artists change a word or two and pretend it was their idea all along."
-Me

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Or another modern saw:

Steal from one: Plagiarism
Steal from many: Research

Roxxsmom said:

Huh? Accidental plagiarism?

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Famous case:
the "my sweet lord"/"he's so fine" plagiarism suit

http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/mysweet.htm

[I believe the article's author is an attorney]

This reminds me. In art school, I was working on a manga project. The story was about 5 failed experiments escaping from a lab. They are human-animal hybrids, each having the top sense of the respective animal, but also many behaviorisms. When their meds wear off, they change completely into the animals, and medicine is running low. They keep their anomaly a secret but since they have tails and ears, that's difficult. Lots of cuteness interlaced with angst.

Then, a huge manga fan, obviously, I discovered Fruits Basket, where a family lives together and trying to avoid the public eye because they change into their respective zodiac animal when touched by the opposite sex. Lots of cuteness interlaced with angst.

Fruits Basket turned out to have been older than my idea but I had no idea it existed. With all the parallels, wouldn't this be a case of accidental plagiarism?

NaeimGiladisLegacy said:

Fruits Basket turned out to have been older than my idea but I had no idea it existed. With all the parallels, wouldn't this be a case of accidental plagiarism?

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To me, the word plagiarism means the person copied someone else's work and tried to pass it off as their own work.

If you didn't know Fruits Basket existed, how could your work have been a copy of it? I'd call it synchronicity.

Reziac said:

Famous case:
the "my sweet lord"/"he's so fine" plagiarism suit

http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/mysweet.htm

[I believe the article's author is an attorney]

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But that's a song, not a novel. I imagine it might be much easier to subconsciously incorporate a chord progression or melody line into a tune you're composing without being consciously aware of it. And there's a fine line between sampling and stealing anyway with music.

Check out the Song "Crazy" (Gnarls Barkley) and the track "Last Man Standing/Ni Cimitero di Tuscon" (from the movie Preparati la bara/Viva Django), for instance.

But it would be hard to lift an entire scene from a novel verbatim (or nearly so) by accident. And with literature, it's never the idea, or even the plot, that's copyrighted, but the actual words. It's incredibly common for stories that explore similar ideas to come out at about the same time in hollywood. I think another thread mentioned how the two movies, Antz and A Bug's Life, came out at almost the same time, for instance.

And in fiction, I can think of 2-3 "Gunpowder" fantasy novels that came out at about the same time in the past couple years. And my husband was talking about the plot of the story "The Stars are My Destination" over dinner tonight, and I actually got it mixed up with the plot of Niven's "All the Bridges Rusting," because both stories dealt with how the "invention" of teleportation had changed society.

amergina said:

Oh yeah, I didn't mean it as an example of plagiarism. Just that folks can have similar ideas at the same time. And completely different executions.

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Oh. Lol. Then we're agreed!

Tazlima said:

You'd feed the paper into this program and it would spit out a percentage, "This paper is 3% plagiarized, or 90% plagiarized, or whatever."

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Oh, I see. The program doesn't determine plagiarism, it just reports a percentage of identical text.

Thanks.

I've never run my work through a plagiarism checker. However, I have thought about what would happen if I used a paragraph/similar phrasing/whatever to some of the work I have made floating around online under pseudonyms/anonymity and someone noticed.

PandaMan said:

Oh, I see. The program doesn't determine plagiarism, it just reports a percentage of identical text.

Thanks.

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So it sounds like it works pretty much like turnitin does, though turnitin also highlights the identical passages.

I'm still not sure what role it would play in fiction.