Anti-plagiarism software is more popular than ever. iParadigms
with its Turnitin system is one of the biggest players in the
market even offering anti-anti-plagiarism software. With its rich
data base of millions of scanned papers, iParadigms now gave insight into what the most popular sources are
for students to plagiarize.
Wikipedia tops off every ranking
To create this ranking of plagiarism sources, the company
analyzed one year data ranging from June 2010 till June 2011. This
entailed 33,5 million papers (9 million from secondary students and
24,5 million from college students) with 128 million content
matches.
The analysis showed that the number 1 source for university
plagiarism remains Wikipedia. 10,74% of all cases of plagiarism
could be attributed to this open source encyclopedia site. Yahoo!
Answers came in second with 3,99% followed by Slideshare (3,87%),
Answers.com (3,57%) and Appapers.com (3,11%).
Content-sharing sites prime source
Dividing the sources into categories, however, reveals that
online encyclopedia sites (12%) are not
so popular after all. Among students social networking
and content-sharing sites are most widespread for
plagiarizing academic work accounting for 26%. Examples include
Facebook, MySpace, Scribd, SlideShare, Question and Answer sites
such as Yahoo! Answers or Answers.com.
Increasing importance also play paper mills and
cheating sites such as oppapers.com and
studentoffurtune.com to which 20% of the plagiarism can be
attributed.
Top 10 sources for student plagiarism
- Wikipedia: 10,74%
- Yahoo! Answers: 3,90%
- SlideShare: 3,87%
- Answers.com: 3,57%
- Oppapers.com: 3,11%
- Coursehero: 3,01%
- Scribd: 2,95%
- Justanswer.com: 1,60%
- eNotes: 1,58%
- Amazon: 1,21%