Plagiarism and Assessment

I regularly discuss issues relating to the assessment of student work when I give presentations on plagiarism, contract cheating and academic misconduct. Since good assessment design is essential to engage students and reduce the potential for cheating, I would find it very difficult to talk about plagiarism and not incorporate assessment into the mix.

It does seem that such an approach is not always true in general. Some work on plagiarism does incorporate assessment. However, work on assessment does not seem to as regularly to incorporate plagiarism.

Academic Papers Referring To Plagiarism And Assessment

The table below shows the number of matches on Google Scholar for the search terms assessment, plagiarism and assessment plagiarism. Patents and citations are excluded, so these searches generally map to academic publications.

all since 2013 since 2016 since 2017
assessment 5,570,000 996,000 371,000 104,000
plagiarism 312,000 31,400 29,100 13,100
assessment plagiarism 61,600 17,700 15,200 5,510

The overall figures suggest that 19.7% of papers on plagiarism also talk about assessment. However, only 1.1% of papers on assessment also talk about plagiarism.

This is, however, something of a simplistic measure, as academic papers use the word assessment to refer to subjects other than work with students. Topics cover such areas as the assessment of fish stock data sets, clinical assessments and the assessment of global warning. Looking through the first few pages of results, I’d estimate that around 1 in 10 uses of assessment actually refer to academic assessments.

By the same token, the rough numbers listed for plagiarism and assessment plagiarism are rather crude. Plagiarism, for instance, is used in other contexts, for instance when talking about plagiarism in books, in popular culture and as part of research misconduct. But this is relatively fair. I believe that it is fair to say that papers relating to plagiarism refer to assessment around twice as often as papers relating to assessment refer to plagiarism (20% compared with 11%).

The good news is that assessment and plagiarism research does seem to have more closely interlinked.

Making similar assumptions to those above:

  • since 2013, 56% of papers relating to plagiarism refer also to assessment, compared with 18% of papers on assessment referring to plagiarism
  • since 2016, 52% of papers relating to plagiarism refer also to assessment, compared with 41% of papers on assessment referring to plagiarism
  • since 2017, 42% of papers relating to plagiarism refer also to assessment, compared with 52% of papers on assessment referring to plagiarism

(the latter data set is relatively small, as 2017 is still in progress, so I would recommend treating that final result with caution)

The trend to relate these two areas does seem to be one that it moving in the right direction.

Academic Paper Titles Referring To Plagiarism And Assessment

To get an alternative measure, I repeated the search on Google Scholar looking for the words plagiarism and assessment in the paper titles.

You can do this using the useful intitle: search term, as below:

all since 2013 since 2016 since 2017
assessment 831,000 71,600 73,900 19,000
plagiarism 5,460 1,770 602 224
assessment plagiarism 60 30 8 2

(note that these figures suggest that papers on assessment were withdrawn between 2013 and 2016, but that is likely to be a glitch based on the way that Google estimates the size of large data sets like these – the overall trends still seem reasonable)

A quick verification of the matches suggests that the 10% figure for the proportion of the assessment results relating to education stills holds.

The results here are interesting in that, although the indications are that assessment and plagiarism are becoming increasingly mentioned in the same papers, this is not a strong link (it is rare to see both terms mentioned in the paper titles).

Looking at all four columns in the time period, the results are relatively similar:

  • between 0.9% and 1.7% of papers referring to plagiarism in the title also refer to assessment
  • between 0.07% and 0.4% of papers referring to assessment in the title also refer to plagiarism

There are few strong links between plagiarism and assessment in research papers. Where these strong links exists, they are almost always a paper on plagiarism that also incorporates assessment (not the other way around).

With that said, the relatively small number of papers demonstrating that they have closely considered plagiarism and assessment would look perfect to review for a focused literature review.

Research Flaws and Opportunities

The numbers here are very rough and ready. The approximation of the percentage of assessment papers relating to educational assessment is exactly that (a rough estimate) and may change from year-to-year. But I feel that there is enough here to illustrate general trends.

(there may also be some simple fixes for this – for instance, I wonder what the results would show if the word education was added to every search?)

Google Scholar, by its nature, is not a perfect system. It doesn’t record every paper, or with the same level of detail. And, sometimes non-papers slip in (I noticed a small number of assessment briefs with accompanying plagiarism statements in there).

It would be interesting to look at a corpus of abstracts to more accurately investigate the research links between plagiarism and assessment.

It would be useful to collect the results on a year-by-year basis to investigate trends, rather than rely on the general groups of dates that Google Scholar offers by default.

It would also be useful to examine alternative wording. For instance, is the term academic integrity linked with assessment research?

And, of course, similar techniques could be used to analyse research links between any two terms, even those completely outside of education.

Maybe I shall try some of those areas out when I have more time. Or, if anyone is interested in working with me on some data mining based research, let me know. There is certainly potential here as well to identify good terminology to use in academic paper titles (think search engine optimisation for academic research).

Web Pages on Assessment and Plagiarism

Even outside of pure academic research, these are rare.

Google finds only 953 web pages with both assessment and plagiarism in the title.

They are an interesting set of pages, many relating to regulations. Maybe I’ll talk more about that in a future post. The suggested related searches are also telling in many ways.

This can be plagiarism and assessment web page result #954.

2 thoughts on “Plagiarism and Assessment”

  1. Pingback: Assessment and Plagiarism – Research Opportunities | Thomas Lancaster

  2. Pingback: Assessment and Plagiarism – Chapter Video Overview | Thomas Lancaster

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