The Effectiveness of the methods Detecting Plagiarism in the Digital Environment An Evaluative Experimental Study

Research Abstract

The World Wide Web has helped spread of information and an easy access to it. Information is not only available through traditional methods as before, but it has also become more reachable through the WWW. This has, in turn, lead to easiness in the process of copying and pasting, and plagiarizing the information published on the Net. The WWW has afforded both an easy access to information and potentiality to exchange it, however, it brought implicitly along with that a pattern of crimes. A pattern that is completely different from those traditional ones which take place in the real, material world. This pattern is embodied in crimes pertinent to information ( information crimes) which occur in the electronic horizon and include plagiarism. Therefore, this study focuses on defining the phenomenon of plagiarism, clarifying its reasons and attempting to set solutions for it through accomplishing the following set of sub-objects: 1- Defining the term plagiarism and its patterns 2- monitoring the software that can detect intellectual theft 3- recognizing the criteria of estimating the quality of software programmes 4- evaluating and examining a number of plagiarism detecting software programmes to know how effective they are 5- designing a descriptive model through which a plagiarism monitoring system based on checking intellectual theft can be developed The study depends on two approaches: the first is the descriptive analytical approach. This is to study the phenomenon under study quantitatively and analytically to identify the underlying reasons. The second one is the experimental approach. This is to test detecting plagiarism software programmes which are the sample of the study. Plagiarism detecting software programmes have been chosen. The sample comprises commercial software and some other free software. The study adopts two methods of collecting data embodied in review checklist and examination. The study shows several results of which the most important ones are as follows: - plagiarism detecting software programmes differ from one another on bases of qualifications, characteristics, the time duration used for checking, the number of results the programme could reach, and the degree of accuracy of the results which differs as well according to the applied programme. It is through examining these software programmes that the study came out with a descriptive model that could be utilized of when designing other software programmes to check plagiarism. The study came out with some recommendations of which the most important ones are the necessity of selecting the best software according to the user's point of view to check plagiarism. This could be through viewing these software programmes and deciding what best meets their needs. Moreover, the subject matter of the study can help when there is a desire to make up a new model to detect plagiarism

Research Keywords

methods Detecting Plagiarism in the Digital Environment An Evaluative Experimental