Academic Plagiarism: Librarians' Solo and Collaborative Efforts to Curb Academic Plagiarism (Education in a Competitive and Globalizing World)

This edited collection is a compilation of practical case studies from academic libraries and librarians working with other college departments, faculty, and/or students. It chronicles their efforts to combat ongoing concerns related to intended and accidental student plagiarism due to the variety of definitions of plagiarism. The contributors to this collection are associated with colleges and universities from around the United States. The authors have a broad range of educational and professional experience and offer unique insights into the wide variety of methods used to help combat student plagiarism in academic libraries. This collection begins with the work of Sarah Clark and Vickie Albrecht (University of Manitoba) as they share how the Academic Integrity Office, Academic Learning Centre, and Libraries at their university collaborated to pilot a program to deliver educational support to students involved in academic misconduct. Their chapter discusses the details of this pilot, as well as the challenges and opportunities that exist in offering educational support in a post-discipline setting. The work of Amy Dye-Reeves (Texas Tech University) shares how a librarian (Dye-Reeves) formed a partnership with the department of clinical psychology at Murray State University to create an academic dishonesty workshop. She describes the collaborative processes taken to develop a disciplinary-specific academic integrity workshop to curb students' plagiaristic behaviors. Sherri Brown (Florida State College at Jacksonville) shares how librarians and English faculty collaborated to design an assessment of students' information literacy skills in an English course. They subscribed to ProQuest's Research Companion database to identify how to cite correctly, paraphrases, and summarizing. This chapter shares the results from the assessment. Monica D. T. Rysavy and Russell Michalak (Partners in Rysavy & Michalak Consultants and Directors at Goldey-Beacom College) discuss how the Office of Institutional Research & Training and the Library and Learning Center's Information Literacy Assessment (ILA) program teaches students how to cite, and to write. The authors, who appended a survey to the ILA program, asked students to provide their definition of plagiarism and rate their perceptions of their peers' plagiaristic behaviors at Goldey-Beacom College. The contribution of Kimberley K. Vardeman and Cynthia L. Henry (Texas Tech University) discuss how as librarians, they partnered with IT, Worldwide E-Learning, and the Ethics Center to integrate the software (Turnitin and iThenticate) into the Learning Management System and to educate instructors about it. This chapter shares the benefits and drawbacks of librarians' serving as the role of enforcing academic integrity as opposed to serving as a support resource for the campus. Navadeep Kahnal and Rhonda K. Whithaus (University of Missouri at Columbia) describe how students, as new initiates and trainees in the scholarly communication field, need to be trained not to plagiarize through education. The training students receive should show them the correct practices of scholarly communication and the reasons for it as well as the consequences of committing plagiarism. This collection is concluded with the work of Emmett Lombard (Gannon University) who discusses librarians' accommodations of international students, and how and why international students use the library. This chapter helps to frame how academic librarians can help international students avoid plagiarism. We believe this collection of chapters provides a unique overview of academic libraries and librarians partnerships with other departments at colleges and universities to help combat the continued concerns related to student plagiarism - both intended and accidental - due to the variety of definitions of plagiarism.