IF A BURGLAR MADE OFF with your stereo, you would know what to do. But what if a professional colleague stole your words? Plagiarism—the act of using someone else’s work without giving proper credit—is a crime of intellectual property, and one might argue that it is just as serious as a crime of real property. Yet the rules of what constitutes plagiarism and how it should be dealt with are not always clear.

With that in mind, the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB) has approved new guidelines for the IEEE that define different levels of plagiarism and set corrective actions to be taken for misconduct [see sidebar, “The Five Levels of Plagiarism”].

It used to be much more difficult to plagiarize than it is today. Another person’s work might have been copied laboriously by hand or, later, more easily with a Xerox machine; now someone’s words can be lifted quickly with a couple of mouse clicks. Electronic dissemination of information during the past few years has been an important contributor to increased reports of plagiarism within the IEEE and elsewhere. The PSPB took action because of the dramatic increase in complaints.

Fortunately, there are two sides to the mouse-click equation. “What allows people to cut and paste others’ work into their own also allows offenders to be found, almost as easily,” says Bill Hagen, the IEEE’s intellectual property rights manager in Piscataway, N.J., USA. Authors can now use powerful search engines to find with relative ease unsanctioned use of their work—a nice way to say their work was plagiarized. “Authors were letting us know about more and more incidents of plagiarism,” says Hagen.

According to Michael R. Lightner, IEEE vice president, Publication Services and Products, and 2005 IEEE president-elect, “The IEEE publishes approximately 450 000 pages a year, under a hundred different editors, hundreds more associate editors and over 300 conference publication chairs. With this volume, you’re bound to have violations.”

Lightner notes that the IEEE has always had procedures in place to deal with plagiarism, but they weren’t uniform. “Some parts of the IEEE would impose a very harsh penalty, and others would have a milder one,” he says. The PSPB’s new guidelines address the disparities. “We felt it was incumbent upon us to examine what we were doing and come up with some uniform processes, definitions and principles throughout the institute,” he says.

Part of the inconsistency might have stemmed from confusion about the different levels of plagiarism. Some plagiarism is intentional, and some comes from sloppy work practices. Other times it results from a misunderstanding of what constitutes plagiarism. The guidelines now outline five levels of plagiarism, as well as the corrective action to be taken for each one. Actions can range from a written apology to the original author to the temporary suspension of the offending party’s IEEE publishing privileges

MAKING THE RIGHT CITATIONS  “So much of research and technology is based on work that preceded it,” Hagen says. “Authors should check that their own writing is original. They can incorporate what might have been done previously if they cite it properly.”

It’s not always easy to spot an incident of plagiarism, however, before it’s too late. “Conferences are a particular problem,” Hagen says, “because of the large number of papers usually involved. Papers get reviewed for quality, but since most conference proceedings have a faster review cycle than periodicals, reviewers may not have an opportunity to recognize plagiarism."

And, when sections of a published conference paper are found to have been plagiarized, it may not always be easy to find the person to complain to. It’s much easier to complain to an editor of a regularly published journal.

“The thing to do with a conference paper,” Hagen says, “is go to the next higher level, to ask the vice president for publications of the society sponsoring the conference, or the equivalent, to consider the situation.”

FITTING SANCTIONS  By the time a decision is made that a paper has violated the plagiarism guidelines, it usually has already been printed. A key question is whether to permanently remove it from the electronic record—a policy recently adopted by one major for-profit publisher. “The IEEE’s decision was to permanently mark the online paper as being in violation of our plagiarism guidelines with a digital watermark [that remains with the paper permanently] but not to remove the document,” Lightner says. “We decided it was more important to preserve the historical record and to maintain consistency between what exists in print and online.”

According to Hagen, plagiarism is likely to become more of a problem, if only because in the past the practice may have gone unnoticed. “As search tools get more sophisticated the opportunity increases for more cases to be found,” Hagen says. “For example, the next version of IEEE Xplore will have a full-text search function that will allow users to enter longer strings of characters and words and increase the chances of finding duplicate or multiple instances of the same text in different papers by different authors.”

Lightner credits two volunteers, former PSPB Vice President Pete Morley and PSPB member Ken Dawson, as well as Hagen and Ken Moore, director of IEEE Book and Information Services, with taking leadership roles and doing a tremendous amount of research and work on the plagiarism guidelines.

The PSPB Operations Manual contains the new policy in Section 8.2 of Publication Guidelines, under the heading “Adjudicating Different Levels of Plagiarism.” It is posted at http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/pab.