Institutions in Tiruchi rely on software tools to detect, prevent plagiarism in academic work
Educational institutions in Tiruchi are increasingly relying on software tools to curb plagiarism and eoncourage academic integrity among faculty and students.
'Anti-plagiarism software has gained importance in the past few years because international universities, journal publishers, as well as leading government agencies in India require all research submissions to have passed through their detection tests first. Though the fees for the commercial software is high, institutions have to integrate it into their system in order to maintain the quality of their academic work,' S. Srinivasaragavan, senior professor and founder head, Department of Library and Information Science, Bharathidasan University (BDU), told The Hindu.
BDU receives close to 1,000 document submissions for verification through software tools in an academic year. 'Image recognition and mathematical formulae, which are public domain information, can be problematic when they are put through plagiarism detectors, but there are ways to work around these issues. The biggest advantage of software tools is that they allow scholars to avoid repetition of research topics. Faculty and students can improve their writing skills through revisions,' said R. Balasubramani, coordinator, BDU Research Ethics and Plagiarism and professor, Department of Library and Information Science.
'Before the software tools were introduced, it was not possible to check 'copy-paste' material in research papers easily. People could hack into submissions from other universities and pass off copied text as their own. Now, under the rules of the University Grants Commission (UGC), text with less than 10% similarity (with the original or cited material) alone will be approved. Once checked by the software, the librarian certifies the final document. So students and faculty members have to be careful about originality,' said R. Parameswaran, librarian, Chozha Central Library at the Central University of Tamil Nadu in Tiruvarur.
At Bishop Heber College, up to 4,000 documents were vetted by software this year. 'The process has been opened up to include undergraduate and postgraduate projects, besides Ph.D and faculty articles. We will be incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) tools next year, to detect and restrict the use of text generated through ChatGPT,' said college librarian J. Gnana Prasad.
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