Plagiarism detection in PowerPoint presentations

The unattributed and substantial use of the words of others is plagiarism.

Colleges, newspapers, and some businesses have codes of behavior for defining and punishing plagiarism. Presumably these standards apply to PowerPoint presentations.

Shown below are two sets of selected slides from PowerPoint stylesheets from the Harvard School of Public Health and from the Health Science Center at the University of Florida.

Perhaps the two sets have a common source, or one borrowed from the other.

The more general issues for this thread are:

How can PowerPoint plagiarism be detected?

What is the extent of PowerPoint plagiarism?

What should be done?

How are acknowledgements to the work of others to be made in PowerPoint?

Should the presenter say at the beginning of the presentation, “Today in slides 3-10 and 22-34, I’m reading aloud from bullet grunts prepared by so-and-so”?

What about a teacher who closely follows or reads aloud slides provided by educational bureaucracies or by publishers whose textbook the teacher has adopted?

The general idea is that, if PP is a serious presentation method, then the usual methods of validation and source credibility should be applied to PP presentations. Maybe a built-in PP plagiarism checker could be a feature in MS Office 2009.