Detecting plagiarism

Plagiarism is a serious offence and anyone accused of this wrongdoing sees his reputation shattered. Still, there are intrepid souls who indulge in intellectual piracy with impunity and get away with it without ever being caught. The problem has become severe with the arrival of the internet and has unwittingly become a vehicle of promoting this despicable crime. As the practice proliferated, publication houses and the academia around the world scrambled to find a tool with which to stop this illicit exercise. Ultimately, a software was developed which could detect plagiarism in books, research papers and theses of scholars. The software has, to a large degree, served to stem the rot.

In Pakistan, where we can safely assume to have a veritable army of intellectual cheats, the software is used by seats of higher learning for precisely the same reason. Reports of plagiarists being caught keep trickling in, and we tend to believe that the software is as much of help as the academic supervisor of the student pursuing a MPhil or a PhD degree in detecting the wrongdoing. This gives the indication that universities apply this tool to spot any instance of copy-pasting with right earnest. But the problem arises when research is conducted in regional languages. According to a report in this newspaper, the campuses in Pakistan have no software to detect plagiarism in local or in foreign languages other than English. They include Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Punjabi. This is a serious handicap, which keeps open the door for students and teachers to indulge in unfair means.

As one faculty member points out, “Many faculty members have filed complaints of plagiarism against their colleagues but lack of an authentic software reduces the changes to verify their claims”. In Punjab alone, there are more than 400 seats for MPhil and PhD programmes in these languages and at least, 500 students produce their theses and research papers. But how can one put his trust in the originality of the research when they are not run through a reliable software to establish genuine authorship?

Published in The Express Tribune, July 11^th, 2014.

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