If you use Google to search for suspected instances of plagiarism, you should be aware that different “flavors” of Google will return different results. What turns up in one may not turn up in another.
There are three “Googles” that you need to know about:
Google will search the contents of web pages, including commercial, educational, non-profit, and personal sites on the internet. Go to the Google Web Search Help Center for more information.
Google Scholar searches only the content of scholarly literature—including books, journal articles, and publications by scholarly societies—across a wide range of disciplines. Go to “About Google Scholar” on the Google Scholar homepage for more information.
Google Books searches only the text of books (both popular and scholarly) whose contents have been scanned into Google’s book database. Go to “About Google Book Search” on the Google Books homepage for more information.
You should enter the text string that you suspect is plagiarized into all three “flavors” of Google in order to perform the widest possible search. See the table below for an example of how sentences from different types of sources (scholarly book, popular book, web article, and journal article) will or won’t appear in different “Googles.”
COMPARISON OF SEARCH RESULTS FOR VARIOUS TYPES OF
TEXT:
|
|
BOOK EXCERPT (SCHOLARLY): “The incarnational aesthetic was not private manifesto, but communal adage.”1 |
BOOK EXCERPT (POPULAR): “Determinists have often invoked the traditional prestige of science as objective knowledge, free from social and political taint.”2 |
WEB ARTICLE: “...one sees a slow temperature rise thought to be anthropogenic, and some oscillations, which are not.”3 |
JOURNAL ARTICLE: “Initially the most noticeable qualities of this speech are its extreme formalism and artificiality.”4 |
|
|
NO |
YES |
YES |
YES |
|
|
YES |
NO |
NO |
YES |
|
|
YES |
YES |
NO |
NO |
1 Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 12.
2 Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996) 52.
3 Terrence M. Joyce, “Observations on Global Warming,” US-India Strategic Dialogue, Aspen Institute, Washington DC, 17 June 2006, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 25 Sept. 2006 < http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/ occi/viewArticle.do?id=14087>
4 Howell D. Chickering, “The Poetry of Suffering in Book V of Troilus,” The Chaucer Review 34.3 (2000): 256.