The use of software to identify plagiarism in academic and educational texts

Abstract

This study corresponds to a project of a teaching research group, which analyzed the authorship of textual works of eleven students. These studies were developed throughout the subject of Biological Sciences of the stricto sensu graduate course of a private university in the state of San Pablo, Brazil. The main objective of this research was to evaluate the existence of plagiarism to answer the research question: Do postgraduate students commit plagiarism during the courses? Thus, the results of plagiarism verification were analyzed and compared using various software available online in paid or free versions. During this study, we observed that most academic studies of postgraduate students presented some plagiarism characteristic and we still found that the amount of plagiarism identified is different depending on the analysis characteristics of the program used. Despite the limitations of the softwares, their regular use to verify the authorship of a text is essential to identify plagiarism and to take educational measures that guide students on the creation process and the impact plagiarism has on learning. We therefore concluded that new pedagogical strategies must be developed and implemented to discourage plagiarism and thus reduce the impoverishment of education. At the same time, we showed that the choice of plagiarism verification software should not be made in a frivolous manner, but consciously and responsibly, because it may lead to different results.

Plagiarism; Technology; Software; Graduation