Yesterday, at our Pedagogic Research Group meeting, we were delighted to welcome Janette Ryan as our guest speaker. She spoke to us about international students and changing learning contexts which was thought provoking and kept us talking for nearly two hours. One part of the discussion was around the myth that international students plagiarise at a higher rate than home students. This is perhaps now being borne out by a rise in complaints by international students to the OIA.
There is still a need for education of students and academics alike in the use and abuse of electronic detection and I am delighted to say that Jon Scott and I have been awarded some funding from the HEA for a synthesis on the evidence of the effectiveness, use and implementation of plagiarism detection by electronic means ‘Dealing with plagiarism in the digital age’. We will use citeulike to support the project by tagging the references we use in the synthesis (example using tag ‘plagiarism‘). The feed from this tag will be public and I am hoping that the plagiarism research community will join us and suggest and tag resources and papers too. The synthesis will become part of the HEA’s evidencenet.
DrBadgr 
RE.. whether or not non-native English speakers plagiarise more often than native English speakers, I guess one way of getting over that is when all students, by default, have their work checked by an antiplagiarism service. That, at least, gets over the issue of it often being very obvious when the writing tone changes – which is, so often, much more obvious with non-native writers.
not necessarily so Emma. There are some (esp. Niall Hayes) who would argue that turnitin has been written to detect the of type of writing that many non-native speakers will use when they first try to paraphrase. See http://www.plagiarismadvice.org/documents/papers/2004Papers11.pdf