Quality, Ethics and Plagiarism Issues in Documents Generated Using Word Spinning Software

Abstract

An enormous number of online resources available on the internet are being used by authors in report writing. Instead of paraphrasing with proper references and citations, some writers opt for shortcuts to generate new documents from documents already published on the internet, by using word spinning software. Some of these word spinning tools are known to be capable of evading plagiarism checks. For this reason, some argue that there would not be any legal obligation related to plagiarism in word spun reports. However, ethical and quality issues of such documents cannot simply be disregarded. Despite an apparent lack of literature published on this issue, this paper includes a comprehensive analysis of different views related to ethicality and plagiarism, from published articles and user forums. The present paper is based upon a study conducted on the assignments submitted by the students at Waiariki Institute of Technology. This research was also focussed on examining both the quality of sentences and the degree of plagiarism of documents created by using a number of word spinners available on the internet. The plagiary of word spun documents was tested using Turnitin software. The quality of each sentence from a number of word spun documents created by a number of word spinners was categorised as 'improved', lowered', or 'distorted' and then analysed using QSR NVivo10 software. The findings of this research indicate significant quality degradation in the word spun documents and total evasion of plagiarism checks.