this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
394 points (99.0% liked)
Science Memes
17598 readers
1887 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Genuinely. As a student I don't think I ever saw a Turnitin score for my work below 40%. There are only so many ways to wrute a sentence about the same thing, so its impossible to not accidentally plagiarise someone's works.
I remember one lecturer telling me that they don't really look at the % unless its something aggregious like +70%. But more often they're looking for patterns in what it highlights.
Loads of tiny highlights with individual sources are likely to be a false positive, but big chunks of highlights from only a couple of sources is likely to be a true positive.
Plagiarism should only ever be counted for explicitly unique sentences that provide actual value.
It's actually an ongoing debate in software engineering, due to licensing, as to what you can consider "stolen code" - i.e. plagiarism.
In fact things went as far as to some companies employing AI-aided automatic cease-and-desist deliveries on GitHub, but the system was so badly configured, it detected even the most basic logic bits as license infringement. Things that are standardised in software development - like, for example, for loops, that happened to have generic parameter names (e.g if you were to create a graphic subsystem for displaying Views, whatever the primary implementation may be, you'd iterate through all views with a for loop, making it a generic call such as
for(val view in views) { [do something here] }).Well this AI aided detector was so brilliant that it detected such minute coincidences of codebases as legitimate violations (as if any company could copyright generics), and sent these spurious C&Ds to dozens of git repos. What's even worse is that the initial company's codebase used some open source libraries that were directly attacked... for being 100% copies of their own codebase.
IMO as long as the code/sentence isn't a provably unique statement, plagiarism shouldn't apply. A whole paragraph having 80%+ similarity to something unique? Now that's worrying enough to investigate.
My PhD thesis got 11% owo
Fair enough. I imagine as a PhD its easier to avoid since you're doing new research, so you're presenting unique information with (in theory) unique sentences.
Whereas for a lot of undergrad students, up until the tail end of their degrees, they're writing about fairly extensively covered topics, so you're much more likely to accidentally steal wordings from others who have already written about them. In fact at that stage, I'd bet having too low a plagiarism score would more likely indicate you're barking up the wrong tree.
It's true. :)