Ivey Publishing business case studies are written by the faculty, as well as accepted from outside individuals and schools. Once a business case study has completed the review process, it is sold worldwide to academics and students.
As the Manager of Business Systems at Ivey Publishing, Sheryl Gregson works closely with her Associate Director to ensure that all of the processes and business systems are operating in support of their customer service and intake of new product. In addition to publishing their own material, Ivey distributes cases submitted by individuals and, by doing so, required a service that would ensure the materials they were releasing to the public were the highest possible quality. “At Ivey Publishing, we were taking products into our system from a variety of different sources. We wanted a way to protect ourselves from any inadvertent use of materials that weren’t original,” said Gregson. “The use of iThenticate was a way for us to do that.”
With iThenticate’s extensive cross-section of materials, Ivey Publishing was able to run business case studies and collections through the database to determine if any of the content submitted was unoriginal prior to publishing. “Most of our product is business-based, so we wanted something that was going to look heavily at those kinds of publications,” said Gregson. “Having a database as extensive as iThenticate’s was really helpful to us in terms of checking the largest number of sources that we could.” As each case study was run through the database, the reports were used as a tool to show faculty the proper way to cite materials. “We used iThenticate as a way to educate our faculty on what is and is not acceptable in terms of what they’re submitting to us. We run it through and evaluate it based on the scores that are coming back and then return the scores to faculty and say, okay, you need to either cite this information more thoroughly or you need to investigate different ways to go about getting this information and presenting it so that it’s not plagiarizing other material,” said Gregson.
While iThenticate has proven to be effective in ensuring high quality business case studies and original content, Gregson encountered an additional benefit by using the product as a means to track down unauthorized postings of their published work. “All of our case studies have a standard copyright statement in them, so when a duplicate is found on the web we have the ability to see where our studies have been posted illegally,” said Gregson. “In some cases it was a legitimate use, but the customer posted it on a public website, so we’ve been able to track them down and ask them to remove it so that our material is not available publicly. iThenticate has been tremendously helpful in this process.”
Publishing division of The Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario
Leading provider of business case studies
Headquartered in London, Ontario, Canada