The Plagiarism Hunters

Publishers have defended their intellectual property by inserting false information into their works to serve as copyright traps. Attempts at identifying plagiarism through textual analysis by computers began with the work of two NIH employees in the early 1990s, although their purely mechanical approach sparked controversy and pushback from the scholarly community. Several individuals, largely through happenstance, have found themselves taking on the role of policing work published in their domains of expertise (such as spy novels, poetry, or microbiology articles). And in Europe, academic plagiarism hunters banded together to identify plagiarism in the dissertations of politicians, including members of Angela Merkel’s cabinet in Germany. A parallel undertaking by academicians in Russia led to accusations of plagiarism by members of the Duma and Vladimir Putin himself. Similar accusations in Romania, Albania, and Serbia contributed to student protests against politicians who had either plagiarized or had their theses ghostwritten. Finally, those who have sounded the alarm about student plagiarism, particularly by athletes, have often suffered consequences for their whistleblowing.