Portal de Murcia
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For one year, the University of Murcia has one of the most popular anti-plagiarism systems in the world: Turnitin.
This software allows teachers to detect non-original text in both the work done by the students in class and in the TFG, TFM and doctoral theses.
The UMU and the UPCT had previously set up a working group in the previous year whose mission was to test the existing anti-plagiarism systems to choose the one that best suited their needs.
Characteristics, price and modalities were compared and, in the end, it was decided that the most convenient for both institutions was Turnitin, one of the most internationally known anti-plagiarism systems.
How the anti-plagiarism system of the UMU works
When a teacher wants to use Turnitin he entrusts a task of user registration to the UMU Library and becomes what is called an "instructor".
The University of Murcia currently has 338 active instructors, that is, professors who have requested similarity reports to Turnitin.
These teachers have carried out more than 3000 similarity reports during this time.
Pablo Pérez Ballester, Area Manager of the University Library, emphasizes that Turnitin provides a report of similarity in which he recognizes the paragraphs of each work that coincide with previous ones, but "whose results must be taken with great caution and studied on a case-by-case basis. , always by the teacher. "
Sources and operation of the anti-plagiarism system
The sources with which Turnitin compares the works to offer reports of similarity are very varied.
Among them, the free internet sources (newspapers, magazines and web pages), also a series of payment resources, in which the most important scientific publishers are included, and the work repositories of other Turnitin clients in the world, as well as the database of the University of Murcia, which also includes the work for which similarity reports have been previously commissioned.
Turnitin shows all the paragraphs that match these texts.
"What is received is a very graphic overview of which part of the content is original of the student and which part comes from other sources", being able to check which fragments of those sources have been cited and which have been copied without citing.
You can parameterize the program so that it does not include what is clearly an appointment, that is, everything that goes in quotes and what is referenced in the most common dating styles.
Once these filters are made, the percentages of coincidence that Turnitin throws must be interpreted since, sometimes, the student introduces the citations differently and Turnitin may not recognize them as citations, so "the revision work by the teacher it remains irreplaceable "according to Pérez Ballester.
Turnitin is only and nothing less - a tool that discovers similarities of fragments of text between documents to the professor, but the only one capable of deciding whether or not it is plagiarism is the teacher, after a thorough revision of the type of texts that has been included, how they are introduced and how they are treated.
Three faculties in the head
At the moment, applying this anti-plagiarism system is not mandatory, although the UMU Vice-Rectorate for Studies is considering including it as a mandatory requirement in TFGs and TFMs.
The three faculties that have shown a special interest in the use of Turnitin, and that have already requested specific training programs for their teachers in the use of this system, are those of Law, Economics and Nursing.
"In the UMU library we have always been clear that, despite the few resources we have, we had to take care of this matter, because we think that one of the competences that the student has to receive in the university is how to use the information of ethical way, "says the director of the University Library, adding that the use for which Turnitin is designed is not to hunt down the offender," but to show him how he has to use the works of other people in his own work, that the The student must make it clear which part of his works is original content and which part is cited, that each work must have a good balance between the original content itself and that of other authors and that, when it is necessary to rely on other works, it results fundamental that the student includes an original part of said works in his work ".
Matching texts
Statistics say that most of the similarity reports sent to Turnitin include between 1 and 24 percent of content from other texts.
These figures do not necessarily imply plagiarism, but there is a coincidence between the texts and it is the teacher who has to figure out which part of that percentage corresponds to well-made appointments and which part has not been correctly referenced as an appointment.
Nor is it the same that a non-original text appears in the conclusions of a work to do so in an introduction because the conclusions must be the result of work done by the student.
All these questions is what the professor must judge, "and this is a great tool to do it, but in no case is a plagiarism detector, the human factor is fundamental", clarifies Pérez Ballester, who adds that he is sure of the importance growing tools like this, because "with the profusion of digital information, copying and pasting is a tremendous temptation."
According to the director of the Library, students should be clearly and constantly explained that jobs serve to learn and to develop their critical capacity.
"A job is something that makes you grow as a person and as a student, teaches research, and therefore the original content must be clear," he says, adding that while there are students who introduce others' texts innocently, there are also people who try to end a process with minimal effort, "which is detrimental to the quality of teaching and the credibility of the university."
Anti-plagiarism systems such as Turnitin serve to help prevent this from happening, but always by the hand of a teacher, who is, in short, the one who always has the last word.
Source: Universidad de Murcia
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