IN SEARCH OF INADVERTENT PLAGIARISM

We investigated whether plagiarism may occur inadvertently if one has implicit-but not explicit-memory for previously seen material. We aske d participants to produce material that was truly original, not just n ovel in the present context. For some categories, participants read an d generated real exemplars; for others they read and generated fictiti ous exemplars. Participants then recalled the items they had generated for each category and generated additional items. Although participan ts inadvertently repeated real exemplars at an above chance rate, they did not repeat the fictitious exemplars. Their failure to repeat the fictitious exemplars was not due to a lack of implicit memory for thos e items because significant repetition priming was obtained in a perce ptual identification test. These results raise the possibility that in advertent plagiarism rarely occurs when people attempt to produce trul y original material.