Plagiarism-Detection Services: How Well Do They Actually Perform?

Professors spend many hours grading student papers and reviewing scholarly work submitted for publication. In addition to providing constructive, informative, and engaging critiques, professors must be aware of a broader literature to enforce academic standards of attribution and integrity. Adopting the mindset to support plagiarism detection- skeptically looking for the source of an unusually well written paragraph, for example-is incompatible with a sympathetic, constructive effort to help authors improve their work.