From Plagiarism Today:
Recently, YouTube sent me down a rabbit hole of videos purporting to have found a “trick” to remove plagiarism in any document.
The videos, mostly made in 2016 and 2017, claimed that they had found a simple way to fool any plagiarism detection application. Though the videos showed several different techniques, many of which we’ve covered before, one new “trick” kept coming up and over and over again: The space replace.
The idea is fairly straightforward. Using your word processor, you simply replace all of the spaces in the document with a character, usually capital “T” and then make that character white.
The idea is that the document will look fine to a human reader but that an automated plagiarism detection tool will simply see a long string of semi-random, albeit unique, characters.
While all of that is true, there’s one very simple problem with this “trick”: It doesn’t work.
No serious plagiarism detection tool will be fooled by this and no one experienced in plagiarism detection will be deceived. If anything, this “trick” risks making the plagiarism even more obvious.
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Nearly all of the videos demonstrate the trick in Microsoft Word. Word’s find/replace functionality makes it very easy to find the spaces and change the font of what replaces them.
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I first copy and paste that text into a document and then export it as a docx.
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With some effort, I was able to replace all of the spaces with white “Ts” and, almost immediately, a problem emerged. Since the text, in the eyes of the word processor is just a handful of really long words, the document’s formatting gets messed up and the spell checker goes a bit crazy. These would be red flags to anyone reading the document that something is off.
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It doesn’t help that my document, which is clearly over a hundred words, is listed as having just 16. Also, if you highlight the text, you can see the Ts, if only barely.
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Nonetheless, we export that document to docx and then run it through PlagScan . . . . This time, PlagScan reports that it is 0% plagiarized. However, even in the document listing, something is clearly wrong.
The document preview clearly shows the Ts in between the words. Things get even worse when you open up the report itself.
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The reason for this is simple, when plagiarism checkers examine a document, they strip away all formatting. This is what makes it possible for this “trick” to obtain a 100% originality score, but it also means that anyone who looks at the document, or even previews it, in the plagiarism checker will immediately see that it’s been tampered with.
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To put it bluntly, this trick doesn’t work. If anything, it may make a plagiarism situation far worse. It joins similar tricks such as replacing letters, using macros, using article spinners and so forth as tricks that either don’t work or produce very low-quality writing.
Instructors, administrators, and those who work in the plagiarism field know this and find these kinds of tricks to be of little threat. The danger is to the students.
These videos and tutorials are targeted at students who are, rightly or wrongly, worried about being accused of plagiarism. However, rather than providing education about citation standards and how to properly paraphrase, the videos teach students that they can easily defeat plagiarism detection tools without having to improve their citation skills or even do their own writing.
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If you see a trick like this and it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Given what’s at stake, especially with the possibility or proving the plagiarism to be malicious, it’s simply not worth the risk.
Link to the rest at Plagiariasm Today
For more information on the detection of plagiarism, here are links to PlagScan, Plagiarism Checker, and Quetext.
PG is definitely not an expert on plagiarism checking, but each of these services looked competent. Some plagiarism checkers even include a semi-automatic citation creation feature to let the potential plagiarisn cite the source and avoid plagiarism.
PG has not heard whether any publishers run manuscripts through any process to detect plagiarism.
As I’ve seen documents written on the same copy of Word screw up the fonts used between them, I have a tendency to grab a wall of text and drop it into notepad before working on it in Word (which would show all those no longer white Ts …)
There are ways to fool the plagiarism checkers, one is rewriting it in your own ‘voice’, but that won’t fool someone familiar with the original work (actually saw it done, the only thing I could say for the plagiarist was that they’d taken an enjoyable story and turned it into a piece of crap that could be read in a fifth the time …)
Keep writing and don’t worry overmuch about the would-be copiers, they can’t fool others for long if they manage to in the first place.
MYMV