Plagiarism in Brazil: A perspective of 25,000 PhD holders across the sciences

Abstract

When it comes to ownership of ideas in science, Robert K. Merton (1957) observed in Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science that "what is true of physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine and mathematics is true also of all the other scientific disciplines, not excluding the social and psychological sciences". However, consensus over related issues, such as what constitutes plagiarism in these fields cannot be taken for granted. We conducted a comprehensive study on plagiarism views among PhD holders registered in the database of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). We collected 25,157 valid responses encompassing views and attitudes toward plagiarism from a probability sample of PhD holders across the fields, including biologists, physicists, mathematicians, and engineers as well as linguists, philosophers and anthropologists. The results suggest that core principles about plagiarism are shared among this multidisciplinary community and that they corroborate Merton's observations. Before this study, we could only speculate that this is the case. With these data from a probability sample of Brazilian academia (PhD holders), this study offers insight into the way plagiarism is perceived across the sciences, including the literature and arts, and sheds light on the problem in the context of international collaborative research networks. The data focus on a young research system in Latin America, but, given the cultural similarities that bind most Latin-American nations, these results may be relevant to other PhD populations in the region and should provide a comparison with studies from other emerging, non-Anglophone regions.American (LA) region, little is known about plagiarism per se in the research arena. Among the few analyses focusing on the publication system, one study that looked at the main Latin American databases SciELO and LILACS (25) shows that plagiarism accounts for the highest percentage of retractions: 86% of retraction notices in journals not listed by Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and 43% in JCR journals, from 2008 to 2014. These percentages are much higher than those usually found in similar studies for the Web of . Whether this result means that Latin American editors are stricter with plagiarism than those from the US and Europe, for example, is an open question. Irrespective of this underexplored problem, LA countries such as Argentina, Chile, and Brazil have broadened their international collaborative research networks with many Anglophone and Asian countries (29,30). In these multicultural collaborative endeavors, shaped by a changing landscape for doing and communicating science, operating within similar research integrity frameworks is surely an asset for researchers and institutions involved (31-34).One group that is clearly engaged in collaborative research and can offer valuable insights into views of and attitudes toward plagiarism is that of PhD holders. Exploring their views is timely, as they play a s...

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