Mark Anderson, a professor of philosophy at Belmont University, publishes an account of Nietzsche's life and work. He remembered liking "Friedrich Nietzsche" (Overlook Press, 2005), by the late independent scholar Curtis Cate, so he started rereading that one. But then he had second thoughts. After all, "Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical…

Rarely do political scandal and academe collide so publicly as they have now, in Europe. In February, Germany's education minister stepped down after Heinrich Heine University, in Dusseldorf, revoked her doctorate because her thesis lifted passages from other sources without proper attribution. Her departure came after scandals over plagiarized…

It is not news that software exists to check undergraduate papers for plagiarism. What is less well known is that some federal grant agencies are using technology to detect plagiarism in grant proposals. That variety of research misconduct is a growing problem, according to federal experts. The National Science Foundation, in its most recent…

Scientific journals have been retracting unreliable articles at rapidly escalating rates in the past few years, raising concern about whether research faces a burgeoning ethical crisis. Various causes have been suspected, with the common theme being that journals are seeing more cases of plagiarism and fudging of data as researchers and editors…

This spring, academic journals may turn the anti-plagiarism software that professors have been using against their students on the professors themselves. CrossRef, a publishing industry association, and the software company iParadigms announced a deal last week to create CrossCheck, an anti-plagiarism program for academic journals. The software…

The orders keep piling up. A philosophy student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric cars. Screen after screen, assignment after assignment--hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come from all disciplines and all parts of the…

Students have cheated for centuries, but the problem is knottier than it used to be. The Internet and its infinite dishonest shortcuts have made many cases more complex, and antiplagiarism software like Turnitin flags more potential offenses than could be caught before. At the same time, professors' and college presidents' run-ins with plagiarism…

Kevin C. Elliott, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, asserts in the January issue of the journal "Accountability in Research" that the three pillars of academe's attempts to police conflict of interest--disclosure, management, and elimination of conflicts--are beset by serious flaws. Charges of…

Faculty members gnash their teeth and wring their hands when students plagiarize. They cry for offenders to be punished. But now an online text-search program directed at their own work suggests that professors in biomedicine may be just as guilty of paper-writing sins. More than 70,000 article abstracts appeared disturbingly similar to other…

This article reports on two authors' work that has been recycled by Routledge without giving credit or royalty. When William E. Deal casually flipped through "Theory for Performance Studies: A Student's Guide," published this year by Routledge, he noticed a few familiar sentences. After taking a closer look, Mr. Deal, a professor of religious…

Among the 100-odd colleges with academic honor codes, plagiarism-detection services raise a knotty problem: Is software compatible with a system based on trust? The answer frequently devolves to the size and culture of the university. Colleges with traditional student-run honor codes tend to "forefront" trust, emphasizing it above all else. This…

This article reports that two married professors, John Moraros and Yelena Bird, whose contracts were not renewed by New Mexico State University, in what they say was a case of discrimination and retaliation, now say they are also the victims of baseless allegations of plagiarism by the university's president. Administrators at New Mexico State,…

A parallel between plagiarism and corporate crime raises eyebrows--and ire-- on campuses, but for John Barrie, the comparison is a perfectly natural one. In the 10 years since he founded iParadigms, which sells the antiplagiarism software Turnitin, he has argued--forcefully, and at times combatively--that academic plagiarism is growing, and that…

Few academic debates are as contentious as those surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls. These fragments of some 800 ancient documents include portions of all but one book of the Hebrew Bible. The first ones were discovered in 1947 by shepherds in caves on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea, and are believed to be the oldest surviving Judaic…

Judge Claude M. Hilton, of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, in March found that scanning the student papers for the purpose of detecting plagiarism is a "highly transformative" use that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. He ruled that the company "makes no use of any work's particular expressive or creative…