Shen Yang, an associate professor in the Information Management School of Wuhan University, pioneered software to detect and prevent plagiarism in university papers. He is calling for stricter enforcement of regulations to curb plagiarism.
He said, ‘We need a law to counter plagiarism in academic papers.’
Shen Yang developed the ROST anti-plagiarism software, which can detect and underline content similar to that in a database of 18.8 billion web pages and 4.9 million papers, so that plagiarism can be found and withheld from publication.
He said that the detection results were only for reference, and suspect papers should be further examined by experts to ensure that content similarities were not accidental.
China.com states that academic plagiarism is rampant in Chinese universities, involving both students and staff. Academic papers are offered for sale on the Internet and some people specialize in helping others to write academic papers.
The other anti-plagiarism software available in China is the Academic Lie-Detector jointly developed by the Electronic Magazine of Chinese Academic Journal and Tsinghua Tongfang CNKI Company.