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Stop, Historians! Don't Copy That Passage! Computers Are Watching
January 26, 2002
By EMILY EAKIN
These are boon times for muckrakers on the scholarship
beat. In the last month alone, not one but two of the
nation's most high-profile historians, Stephen Ambrose and
Doris Kearns Goodwin, stand accused of plagiarism in cases
that are generating headlines and hand-wringing.
Sensing an opportunity to uncover front-page-worthy fraud,
journalists armed with Post-It notes - and anonymous tips
about the thefts - have turned into literary gumshoes,
painstakingly combing through books in the library stacks.
But the job needn't be so taxing. Over the last decade,
plagiarism detection has gone high-tech. Today's software
market is flooded with programs designed to rout out
copycats with maximum efficiency and minimum effort.
Historians were among the first scholars to try to nail a
plagiarism suspect with a computer. In 1991, in a case that
became famous in academic circles, several historians filed
a complaint with the American Historical Association
charging Stephen B. Oates, a historian at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of a well-regarded
1977 biography of Abraham Lincoln, with plagiarism.
As evidence, Mr. Oates's accusers pointed to passages in
his book that closely resembled passages in a 1952
biography of Lincoln by Benjamin P. Thomas. Mr. Oates
furiously denied the charges, attributing any similarities
between the two books to a reliance on the same historical
sources. Twenty-three colleagues signed a public statement
calling the plagiarism charges "totally unfounded." After
deliberating on the case for a year, the association ruled
that Mr. Oates had "failed to give Mr. Thomas sufficient
attribution for the material he used," but carefully
avoided the word plagiarism.
Some of Mr. Oates's opponents were convinced he was being
let off the hook too easily. One hit on the idea of having
a computer judge the case and approached Walter Stewart and
Ned Feder, scientists at the National Institutes of Health
in Bethesda who had developed what the media dubbed a
"plagiarism machine."
Mr. Stewart and Mr. Feder spent four months on the project.
By the time it was over, they had scanned more than 60
books into a computer and compared them not just to Mr.
Oates's Lincoln biography but to his subsequent biographies
of William Faulkner and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
as well. Their software followed a simple rule: each time a
string of at least 30 characters in one of Mr. Oates's
books matched a string of 30 characters in one of the other
books, the computer made a note. (Strings of fewer than 30
characters were apt to turn up meaningless matches -
including common proper names and phrases.)
In February 1993, the scientists submitted a 1,400- page
report to the association, detailing what they claimed were
175 instances of plagiarism in the Lincoln biography, 200
instances in the Faulkner biography and 240 instances in
the King biography, all identified by their computer. But
once again the association found no evidence of plagiarism,
though it did state that Mr. Oates had depended to a degree
greater than recommended "on the structure, distinctive
language and rhetorical strategies of other scholars and
sources." The association also took pains to dismiss Mr.
Stewart and Mr. Feder's plagiarism machine, declaring that
"computer-assisted identification of similar words and
phrases in itself does not constitute a sufficient basis
for a plagiarism or misuse complaint."
The scientists' supervisors at the National Institutes of
Health were no more enthusiastic. When they caught wind of
Mr. Stewart and Mr. Feder's extracurricular activities,
they confiscated the plagiarism machine and had their
research lab shuttered.
For the nascent plagiarism detection business, this was an
inauspicious beginning, but hardly, it turned out, a major
setback. Nearly 10 years later, antiplagiarism software is
routinely used by dozens of colleges and universities -
even high schools - on student work.
At one end of the spectrum are companies like Turnitin.com,
based in Oakland, Calif., which uses a software program to
check the content of student work against millions of sites
around the Web and a database of papers from online
term-paper mills.
At the other end are companies like Glatt Plagiarism
Services in Chicago, which draw on techniques from
cognitive theory to verify authorship. The Glatt Plagiarism
Screening program, for example, relies on a method called
the "Cloze procedure," originally used in the reading
comprehension portion of standardized intelligence tests.
Sample passages from a suspect work - which can range in
size from a single essay to an entire book - are scanned
into a computer, which, following the Cloze procedure,
removes every fifth word. The sample passages are then
returned to the author, who is asked to fill in the missing
words.
Glatt's founder and president, Dr. Barbara Glatt, says that
if the work is authentic, the author will be able to recall
most of the missing words. A plagiarist, on the other hand,
will invariably flunk the test, or else fess up before
taking it. "It's a tough test to pass," Dr. Glatt said. "I
have never gotten 100 percent of them right."
Nevertheless, she insisted, the Cloze technique is
considered highly reliable. Scientists have tried removing
the third and fourth words instead, she said, but with much
less success. "So far," she added, "no one has ever been
falsely accused by the test."
Of course, neither of these approaches seems well suited
for catching scholarly plagiarists. Professional historians
of the stature of Mr. Ambrose and Ms. Goodwin, both of whom
deny plagiarism but concede carelessness, are unlikely to
be stealing from online term- paper mills. And though Dr.
Glatt's approach has the advantage of being able to detect
plagiarism when the identity of the plagiarized text is
unknown, it's hard to imagine scholars readily agreeing to
sit through a Cloze procedure exam at their accusers'
request.
The approach Mr. Stewart and Mr. Feder adopted - comparing
one book to another - may still be a literary sleuth's best
bet.
Last year, Louis Bloomfield, a physics professor at the
University of Virginia, created one such software program
that he uses to run quick checks on his students' work.
(When he first tried it last spring, he found 122 cases of
possible cheating, leading to 15 student explusions and
volunteer departures so far.) "It would be interesting to
scan the world's libraries into electronic form and start
doing these kinds of comparisons," Mr. Bloomfield said with
a mischievous laugh. "I'm afraid you'd pop up all kinds of
trouble."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/26/arts/26TANK.html?ex=1013050500&ei=1&en=ed2c3ac32c1d2b23
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