Plagiarism and the Web.

Thousands of term papers, essays, research papers, and theses are available from the Web for free or a fee. Some online paper mills have specific sections for social work. Countless other websites provide excellent information that can easily be stolen and pasted into papers. The best prevention approach is education. Help students develop accurate and in-depth working definitions of plagiarism. Most people agree that the primary problem is that students do not really understand the meaning of plagiarism. Determining whether students' work is entirely their own or whether it has been electronically boosted by unquoted sources or a paper mill is a difficult task. Unambiguous detection and confirmation become the primary tasks. Three approaches are possible: directly investigating theft by search, use of a detection service, and routine analysis via plagiarism-detecting software programs. A professor can directly search on the Web for suspect prose by using search engines. This usually consists of directly copying a short sample of the suspect prose into a search engine and looking for its mirror counterpart.