Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff is a German computer scientist with strong history of work on plagiarism. Although some examples are specific to Germany, most of the book is widely applicable and ought to be useful for anyone approaching this topic.
in some sense, it documents the arms race between plagiarist and those who find and expose plagiarism.
In the Internet era, copy-paste-edit is all too easy, but others are fighting back with better tools and cooperative Wikis.
People should take a quick look at the Table of Contents. The material is well-organized, starting with different kinds of plagiarism. Chapter 3, sections 3.5-3.7 are somewhat specific to Germany, but sections 3.1-3.4 are more generally relevant. The background of the VroniPlag Wiki is quite interesting as an example of a collaborative online effort, more formalized than occasional others based on blogs. American readers might want to look up "habilitation," a term I'd never heard, but common in Europe.
The heart of the book is the 40-page Chapter 4 on Plagiarism Detection. It offers excellent, current advice on the state of the art of methods and tools, quite properly noting that human involvement remains crucial. The "barcode" displays seem very useful for a high-level overview, especially for long dissertations. Tools can be improved, and there are interesting computing science and human interface problems in detection and display.
Chapter 6 briefly examines plagiarism in other countries, interesting for comparison of approaches and cultural differences.
I did notice one omission regarding the United States. US universities have codes of academic misconduct that include definitions for falsification, fabrication and plagiarism in *research* and detailed procedural rules for handling complaints. They are strongly influenced by guidelines from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Although there is room for variation, the Office of Research Integrity(ORI), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and others use these guidelines, relevant for Federal research grants. As a result, one finds similar words in many university codes, although nothing guarantees that schools will actually execute their procedures well. (Some do, there is room for doubt about others, akin to her findings on German universities.) For US Federally-funded research, the NSF and ORI have extensive public files online of closed cases.
The RetractionWatch blog is a good site whose cases include plagiarism in any published papers and she mentions that.
Appendix F gives a good list of relevant Internet URLs. That is useful, although bound to get out of date, but her websites are actively updated.
Despite the one omission above, this is a very good book. I've spent some time finding and documenting plagiarism (and sometimes falsification/fabrication), and her advice seems good, and matches my experience where we overlap, but I learned new things as well. Finding and displaying plagiarism well is hard work, and this helps.
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Top reviews from other countries
Maria Estela Gonzalez Acevedo
Un excelente libro de consulta
Reviewed in Mexico on June 12, 2020
Walter Schmitting
Exzellente Darstellung des Status Quo
Reviewed in Germany on July 27, 2015