Their 2008 study, “On Academic Plagiarism in Europe” found plagiarism far more common in Bulgaria than in Britain, but also found that students in both countries were reluctant to report the practice.

Jonathan Bailey, a consultant in New Orleans who runs the Web site “Plagiarism Today,” agrees. “There’s a lot of cultural differences in how people respond to plagiarism,” he said.

In the former republics of the Soviet Union, “people grew up with a very strong idea that intellectual property was community property. So there is still real resistance to the idea that words belong to anyone,” Mr. Bailey said. In many developing countries, a formal or legal prohibition against plagiarism “comes up against their desire to become a power in the global scientific community,” he said.

“This is a major stumbling block in China, for example,” he added.

Mr. Bailey said that in countries where there was a lot of pressure to publish, and where publication was not in a major European language, hence not easily detectable by computerized comparison, the rewards could outweigh the risks.

“I’ve often had conversations where I’ve said ‘We look at this as stealing’ and they say ‘We’re not harming a person. I found this information on the Internet, and my research is just as valid.’ Attitudes are shifting, but very slowly,” Mr. Bailey said, adding that Americans could be as cavalier as anyone else when confronted with plagiarism. “I wrote a report showing that the president of a college in Alabama had plagiarized his doctorate. He’s still in office. And Joe Biden is vice president of the United States.”

In 1987 Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential bid was derailed after it was revealed that he had lifted passages of his stump speech about being the first in his family to attend college from a speech by Neil Kinnock, leader of the British Labour Party.

Although Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution secures “to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” the American record on intellectual property has long been mixed. Copyrights, which protect an author’s legal and financial interests, and patents, which do the same for inventors, both derive from this clause.