The article on plagiarism (“Spain’s battle for originality is like herding (copy)cats”, News, 26 June) is a tad complacent when discussing this problem in the UK.
I have heard postgraduates discussing how they write an essay, then highlight sentences to copy and paste into Google Scholar to find an appropriate or approximate reference that matches what they have written.
Although not plagiarism, this practice means that there is a generation of students who are blagging their way through university without ever having read a book, page or paragraph that they have referenced.
The end product undermines the academy in much the same way that plagiarism does.
Bernard J. Mulholland
Belfast
