Plagiarism: A silent epidemic in scientific writing – Reasons, recognition and remedies

Abstract

Plagiarism is one of the most serious forms of scientific misconduct prevalent today and is an important reason for significant proportion of rejection of manuscripts and retraction of published articles. It is time for the medical fraternity to unanimously adopt a 'zero tolerance' policy towards this menace. While responsibility for ensuring a plagiarism-free manuscript primarily lies with the authors, editors cannot absolve themselves of their accountability. The only way to write a plagiarism-free manuscript for an author is to write an article in his/her own words, literally and figuratively. This article discusses various types of plagiarism, reasons for increasingly reported instances of plagiarism, pros and cons of use of plagiarism detection tools for detecting plagiarism and role of authors and editors in preventing/avoiding plagiarism in a submitted manuscript. Regular usage of professional plagiarism detection tools for similarity checks with critical interpretation by the editorial team at the pre-review stage will certainly help in reducing the menace of plagiarism in submitted manuscripts.

Technical and Non-Technical Programme Students’ Attitudes and Reasons for Plagiarism

“…Poor writing skills was also cited in Pecorari and Petric's (2014) and Debnath's (2016) studies, and time constraints was cited in both Jones' (2011) as well as Eret and Gokmenoglu' s (2010) studies.…”

“…Park (2003) reviewed Stevens and Stevens' (1987), Davis et al's (1992), Love and Simmons' (1998) and Straw's (2002) work and drew up a "typology of reasons" for plagiarising. We added other works of Davis and Ludigson (1995), Devlin and Gray (2007), Akbulut et al (2008), Abdolmohammadi and Baker (2008), Erkaya (2009), Songsriwittaya et al (2009), Owunwanne, Rustagi and Dada (2010), Eret and Gokmenoglu (2010), Simkin and McLeod (2010), Comas-Forgas and Sureda Negre (2010), Gross (2011), Jones (2011), Rezanejad and Rezaei (2013), Hosny and Fatima (2014), and Debnath (2016) to reference similar findings as well as to expand Park's typology: (i) "Genuine lack of understanding": This can be seen from three perspectives, i.e. lack of academic skills pertaining to plagiarism, lack of knowledge of subject matter and lack of awareness about plagiarism.…”

“…(viii) "Temptation and opportunity": The temptation to plagiarise perhaps cannot be resisted with the available opportunities of quickly cutting and pasting (Park, 2003;Akbulut et al, 2008;Owunwanne, Rustagi & Dada, 2010;Comas-Forgas & Sureda Negre, 2010;Debnath, 2016) the easily accessible world of information from the internet. Gross (2011) remarked that students "hold communal interaction and collaboration in the highest regard" and therefore regard information that is shared publicly on the Internet is free for all.…”

“…As mentioned earlier, with additional review of other works by Devlin and Gray (2007), Akbulut et al (2008), Eret & Gokmenoglu (2010), Comas-Forgas and Sureda Negre (2010), Rezanejad and Rezaei (2013), Jones (2011) and Debnath (2016), we have added to Park's (2003) typology of the reasons, the following: (x) Institutional load, includes "inadequate admission criteria, poor and education costs" (Devlin & Gray, 2007), tight workload (Jones, 2011) or class schedules and difficulty of assignments, "heavy course loads" (Comas-Forgas & Sureda Negre, 2010;Eret & Gokmenoglu, 2010).…”

“…(xi) Students' inadequacies: Students may be compelled to plagiarise as they lack confidence (Debnath, 2016), which could be due to their lack of proficiency (Eret & Gokmenoglu, 2010) in the target language and writing skills (Debnath, 2016). This could consequently lead to being more confident in the original text (Rezanejad & Rezaei, 2013).…”