Top 10 of plagiarism sources

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7 november 2011 | Students cheat and plagiarize - sometimes. But if they do, where do they copy their work? A research conducted by one of the market leaders in anti-plagiarism software sheds some light on this question.

Anti-plagiarism software is more popular than ever. iParadigmswith its Turnitin system is one of the biggest players in themarket even offering anti-anti-plagiarism software. With its richdata base of millions of scanned papers, iParadigms now gave insight into what the most popular sources arefor students to plagiarize.

Wikipedia tops off every ranking

To create this ranking of plagiarism sources, the companyanalyzed one year data ranging from June 2010 till June 2011. Thisentailed 33,5 million papers (9 million from secondary students and24,5 million from college students) with 128 million contentmatches.

The analysis showed that the number 1 source for universityplagiarism remains Wikipedia. 10,74% of all cases of plagiarismcould 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 thatonline encyclopedia sites (12%) are notso popular after all. Among students social networkingand content-sharing sites are most widespread forplagiarizing academic work accounting for 26%. Examples includeFacebook, MySpace, Scribd, SlideShare, Question and Answer sitessuch as Yahoo! Answers or Answers.com.

Increasing importance also play paper mills andcheating sites such as oppapers.com andstudentoffurtune.com to which 20% of the plagiarism can beattributed.

Top 10 sources for student plagiarism

1. Wikipedia: 10,74%
2. Yahoo! Answers: 3,90%
3. SlideShare: 3,87%
4. Answers.com: 3,57%
5. Oppapers.com: 3,11%
6. Coursehero: 3,01%
7. Scribd: 2,95%
8. Justanswer.com: 1,60%
9. eNotes: 1,58%
10. Amazon: 1,21%