IF YOU believe the newspapers, plagiarism is on the rise. Hardly a month goes by without a report of an author “borrowing” from someone else’s book, a scientist claiming credit for another’s idea, or students completing their essays with passages downloaded from the internet. Some blame the Google generation, alleging a cut-and-paste mentality and hazy notions of ownership.
In fact, plagiarism is becoming a lot harder – for students at least. Many universities in Europe and the US have started using software packages that detect similarities between, say, an essay and existing documents. The best known, called Turnitin, uses a…
