Survey of Academic Library Leadership 2024, Library Role in Addressing Plagiarism

Survey of Academic Library Leadership 2024, Library Role in Addressing Plagiarism

This study presents data and commentary from 50 academic library directors or other high level executives about their library role in addressing plagiarism. The advent of generative artificial intelligence and its broad use in academia has created a plethora of new questions about exactly what plagiarism is, how it should be identified and policed, and how academic libraries should respond. Traditionally, academic libraries have played a major role in defining and explaining plagiarism to students and developing strategies to eliminate it. This role has assumed greater importance.

The report gives detailed data on the rate of increase in instances of plagiarism, and on how librarians evaluate the seriousness of the problem at their institution. It also presents data on the percentage of libraries that offer access to Turnitin and similar applications, and measures librarian confidence in automated efforts to detect plagiarism, especially AI-assisted plagiarism. Librarians also offer insights on how clear that they feel are their institution’s definitions of and policies on plagiarism, and what are some of the best methods for combatting plagiarism on campus.

Just a few of this 35-page report’s many findings are that:

The mean increase in complaints about plagiarism received in the past year was 17.58%.

A shade less than half of survey participants felt that their institution’s policies on plagiarism were either clear or very clear.

14% of survey respondents from institution’s charging more than $34,000 in annual tuition felt that the plagiarism problem at their institution was serious or very serious.

62.5% of research university libraries in the sample offered access to Turnitin.

Data in the report is broken out by numerous institutional and personal variables such as enrollment size, public/private status, college Carnegie class or type, and level of tuition for institutions and gender and age for individual respondents.