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Plagiarism and the commodification of knowledge

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Abstract

Universities have put in place various policies and punishments to manage plagiarism and it is an issue of significant interest. This article looks at how plagiarism is discussed in the 55 Higher Education articles between 1982 and June 2022 that make some reference to the term. Many of the articles focused on a police-catch-punish approach and imbued a strong moral charge to the issue. In contrast to such articles were those that presented citation as a complex academic practice that needs to be engaged with educationally. Our understandings of and responses to plagiarism emerge from a number of causal mechanisms but I argue that a key mechanism is the commodification of knowledge. Where knowledge is a product to be packaged, bought, and sold, then ownership and attribution become more important than engagement and personal meaning making. Instead of our obsession with a police-catch-punish approach to plagiarism, at a more micro-level, we should be inducting students into the many roles citations serve, and at a macro-level, we should be engaging in considerations of the purposes of a higher education and how we might better enable students to enjoy a transformative relationship to knowledge.

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Notes

  1. While Higher Education began in 1972, its searchable archives online are from 1982 to date.

  2. This point should not be confused with the matter of different citation styles, such as APA or Chicago, which can be readily implemented by software programs; rather the issue is that citation often serves different purposes in different fields. In some Natural Science fields, for example, citations are typically found only in the literature review section and methods are simply stated without attribution; in contrast in some Social Science fields, the methods section is replete with citations providing peer-reviewed support for the design choices made by the researcher.

  3. The company Turnitin specifies that the software does not detect plagiarism, though this information is not readily available on their website or marketing materials and one would need to actively seek it out: https://www.turnitin.com/blog/does-turnitin-detect-plagiarism

  4. It is on this issue that most court cases against text-matching software companies have been based on the grounds that the companies are infringing privacy, ownership, and copyright. To date, these cases have found in favour of the software companies because users agree, via a mouse-click, to terms and conditions before uploading their documents (Barakat 2008). However, such court cases have led to shifts in practice in some universities (Churchill 2005).

  5. It is possible to set the software to exclude direct quotes but this is not fool proof as the software often battles to distinguish direct quotes where unusual formatting is used. Furthermore, the ability to exclude direct quotes often becomes the basis on which students learn to trick the software through the use of invisible inverted commas and similar practices (Turnitin themselves discuss such practices on their blog https://www.turnitin.com/blog/can-students-trick-turnitin).

  6. A variety of online paraphrasing tools, such as quillbot and paraphraser.io have sprung up that allow students to change sufficient words to trick the software.

  7. My experience of undertaking quality audits of ten universities across five countries has shown me how common the setting of a maximum percentage score for students on the similarity index is: the malpractice occurred in eight of the ten universities.

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  1. Centre for Postgraduate Studies, Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa

    Sioux McKenna

  2. Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, Newton, USA

    Sioux McKenna

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McKenna, S. Plagiarism and the commodification of knowledge. High Educ 84, 1283–1298 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00926-5

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