False Feathers A Perspective on Academic Plagiarism

Since human beings have been writing it seems there has been plagiarism. It is not something that sprouted with the advent of the Internet. Teachers have been struggling for years in countries all over the globe to find good methods for dealing with the problem of plagiarizing students. How do we spot plagiarism? How do we teach them not to plagiarize? And how do we deal with those who have been found out to be plagiarists? The purpose of this book is to collect material on the various aspects of plagiarism in education with special attention given to the German problem of dissertation plagiarism. Since there is a wide-spread interest in the German plagiarism situation and in strategies for dealing with it, the book is written in English in order to be accessible to a larger audience.

Debora Weber-Wulff (1957) is a Professor of Media and Computing at the University of Applied Sciences, HTW Berlin. She studied computer science in San Diego, CA, USA and Kiel, Germany. The topic of plagiarism has been one of her main interests since 2002, and she is active in the German VroniPlag Wiki group, which has been documenting plagiarism in dissertations since 2011. She blogs in English on scientific misconduct (copy-shake-paste.blogspot.com) and oversees a German-language portal on plagiarism (plagiat.htw-berlin.de).