analysis plagiarism and research ethics

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Research Ethics and Plagiarism: What We Need to Know

Research ethics are like a moral compass that guide researchers in their pursuit of knowledge. They ensure that research is conducted in a responsible and ethical manner, and that the knowledge gained from research is used for the betterment of society.

The principles of research ethics

One of the core principles of research ethics is respect for individuals. This means that researchers must always treat their study participants with dignity and respect, and that they must obtain informed consent from all participants before the research begins. For example, a study on the effects of a new drug might involve obtaining informed consent from patients who are willing to participate in the study.

In addition to these core principles, ethics also involve ensuring that researchers are honest and transparent in their reporting of their findings. This means that researchers must avoid plagiarism, accurately report their methods and results, and always acknowledge the contributions of others..

Avoiding plagiarism

Learn about the ways to avoid plagiarism in your work:

Use quotation marks or block quotes for direct quotes. If you're using someone else's exact words, make sure to put them in quotation marks or use a block quote to clearly indicate that they're not your own words.

Paraphrase and summarize in your own words. Instead of copying someone else's work word-for-word, try to summarize or paraphrase the information in your own words. Just make sure to still give credit to the original author.

Use proper citation and referencing. Make sure to cite your sources and give credit to the authors whose work you're referencing. Use the appropriate citation style for your field, such as APA or MLA.

Use plagiarism detection tools. Many online tools can help you check your work for plagiarism before submitting it. You can use a  plagiarism checker no word limit and check if you’ve used phrases similar to someone’s. By checking your work before submission, you can identify any problematic areas and make the necessary revisions to ensure that your writing is original and properly cited.

Stay organized. Keeping track of your sources and notes can help you avoid confusion and ensure that you properly cite all of your sources.

Following research ethics

For instance, let's say you're working on a research project about the effects of climate change on local wildlife. Following research ethics would involve treating your study participants with respect and dignity, obtaining informed consent, and taking measures to avoid causing physical or emotional harm. By doing so, you can ensure that your findings are valid and that your study contributes to society in a meaningful way.

What you must know as a student

Here's a list of things every student must know about research ethics and plagiarism:

• The principles of research ethics, including:
• respect for individuals
• avoiding harm
• being honest and transparent in reporting findings.
• The importance of obtaining informed consent and protecting the privacy and confidentiality of study participants .
• The consequences of plagiarism. These include academic penalties and damage to personal and professional reputation.
• The importance of citing sources and giving credit to the work of others, as well as avoiding self-plagiarism.
• The different types of plagiarism, such as:
• direct copying
• paraphrasing without citation
• purchasing or sharing papers.
• The resources available to help students avoid plagiarism, including plagiarism checkers and citation management tools.
• The role of academic integrity in building a successful career and contributing to society in an ethical and responsible way.

Final thoughts

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ETHICS AND PLAGIARISM IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH:A  CRITICAL ANALYSIS

• Kavita Sharma 1, Ashutosh Shukla3, Laishram Malem Mangal3 Author

Ethics and plagiarism are two interconnected concepts that significantly influence the integrity and credibility of academic research. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the ethical considerations surrounding plagiarism in academic research. It examines the definition of plagiarism, its various forms, and the ethical implications associated with its occurrence. Furthermore, the paper discusses the underlying reasons for plagiarism, including academic pressure, lack of understanding, and cultural differences. Additionally, it explores the consequences of plagiarism, both for individuals and the academic community as a whole. Finally, the paper offers practical strategies for preventing and addressing plagiarism, emphasizing the importance of education, awareness, and institutional policies in upholding academic integrity.

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• ISSN: 1539-1590
• E-ISSN: 2573-7104

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• NATURE INDEX
• 01 May 2024

Plagiarism in peer-review reports could be the ‘tip of the iceberg’

• Jackson Ryan 0

Jackson Ryan is a freelance science journalist in Sydney, Australia.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Time pressures and a lack of confidence could be prompting reviewers to plagiarize text in their reports. Credit: Thomas Reimer/Zoonar via Alamy

Mikołaj Piniewski is a researcher to whom PhD students and collaborators turn when they need to revise or refine a manuscript. The hydrologist, at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, has a keen eye for problems in text — a skill that came in handy last year when he encountered some suspicious writing in peer-review reports of his own paper.

Last May, when Piniewski was reading the peer-review feedback that he and his co-authors had received for a manuscript they’d submitted to an environmental-science journal, alarm bells started ringing in his head. Comments by two of the three reviewers were vague and lacked substance, so Piniewski decided to run a Google search, looking at specific phrases and quotes the reviewers had used.

To his surprise, he found the comments were identical to those that were already available on the Internet, in multiple open-access review reports from publishers such as MDPI and PLOS. “I was speechless,” says Piniewski. The revelation caused him to go back to another manuscript that he had submitted a few months earlier, and dig out the peer-review reports he received for that. He found more plagiarized text. After e-mailing several collaborators, he assembled a team to dig deeper.

Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers

The team published the results of its investigation in Scientometrics in February 1 , examining dozens of cases of apparent plagiarism in peer-review reports, identifying the use of identical phrases across reports prepared for 19 journals. The team discovered exact quotes duplicated across 50 publications, saying that the findings are just “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to misconduct in the peer-review system.

Dorothy Bishop, a former neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK, who has turned her attention to investigating research misconduct, was “favourably impressed” by the team’s analysis. “I felt the way they approached it was quite useful and might be a guide for other people trying to pin this stuff down,” she says.

Peer review under review

Piniewski and his colleagues conducted three analyses. First, they uploaded five peer-review reports from the two manuscripts that his laboratory had submitted to a rudimentary online plagiarism-detection tool . The reports had 44–100% similarity to previously published online content. Links were provided to the sources in which duplications were found.

The researchers drilled down further. They broke one of the suspicious peer-review reports down to fragments of one to three sentences each and searched for them on Google. In seconds, the search engine returned a number of hits: the exact phrases appeared in 22 open peer-review reports, published between 2021 and 2023.

The final analysis provided the most worrying results. They took a single quote — 43 words long and featuring multiple language errors, including incorrect capitalization — and pasted it into Google. The search revealed that the quote, or variants of it, had been used in 50 peer-review reports.

Predominantly, these reports were from journals published by MDPI, PLOS and Elsevier, and the team found that the amount of duplication increased year-on-year between 2021 and 2023. Whether this is because of an increase in the number of open-access peer-review reports during this time or an indication of a growing problem is unclear — but Piniewski thinks that it could be a little bit of both.

Why would a peer reviewer use plagiarized text in their report? The team says that some might be attempting to save time , whereas others could be motivated by a lack of confidence in their writing ability, for example, if they aren’t fluent in English.

The team notes that there are instances that might not represent misconduct. “A tolerable rephrasing of your own words from a different review? I think that’s fine,” says Piniewski. “But I imagine that most of these cases we found are actually something else.”

The source of the problem

Duplication and manipulation of peer-review reports is not a new phenomenon. “I think it’s now increasingly recognized that the manipulation of the peer-review process, which was recognized around 2010, was probably an indication of paper mills operating at that point,” says Jennifer Byrne, director of biobanking at New South Wales Health in Sydney, Australia, who also studies research integrity in scientific literature.

Paper mills — organizations that churn out fake research papers and sell authorships to turn a profit — have been known to tamper with reviews to push manuscripts through to publication, says Byrne.

The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science

However, when Bishop looked at Piniewski’s case, she could not find any overt evidence of paper-mill activity. Rather, she suspects that journal editors might be involved in cases of peer-review-report duplication and suggests studying the track records of those who’ve allowed inadequate or plagiarized reports to proliferate.

Piniewski’s team is also concerned about the rise of duplications as generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes easier to access . Although his team didn’t look for signs of AI use, its ability to quickly ingest and rephrase large swathes of text is seen as an emerging issue.

A preprint posted in March 2 showed evidence of researchers using AI chatbots to assist with peer review, identifying specific adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports .

Bishop isn’t as concerned as Piniewski about AI-generated reports, saying that it’s easy to distinguish between AI-generated text and legitimate reviewer commentary. “The beautiful thing about peer review,” she says, is that it is “one thing you couldn’t do a credible job with AI”.

Preventing plagiarism

Publishers seem to be taking action. Bethany Baker, a media-relations manager at PLOS, who is based in Cambridge, UK, told Nature Index that the PLOS Publication Ethics team “is investigating the concerns raised in the Scientometrics article about potential plagiarism in peer reviews”.

How big is science’s fake-paper problem?

An Elsevier representative told Nature Index that the publisher “can confirm that this matter has been brought to our attention and we are conducting an investigation”.

In a statement, the MDPI Research Integrity and Publication Ethics Team said that it has been made aware of potential misconduct by reviewers in its journals and is “actively addressing and investigating this issue”. It did not confirm whether this was related to the Scientometrics article.

One proposed solution to the problem is ensuring that all submitted reviews are checked using plagiarism-detection software. In 2022, exploratory work by Adam Day, a data scientist at Sage Publications, based in Thousand Oaks, California, identified duplicated text in peer-review reports that might be suggestive of paper-mill activity. Day offered a similar solution of using anti-plagiarism software , such as Turnitin.

Piniewski expects the problem to get worse in the coming years, but he hasn’t received any unusual peer-review reports since those that originally sparked his research. Still, he says that he’s now even more vigilant. “If something unusual occurs, I will spot it.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01312-0

Piniewski, M., Jarić, I., Koutsoyiannis, D. & Kundzewicz, Z. W. Scientometrics https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04960-1 (2024).

Article   Google Scholar  

Liang, W. et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.07183 (2024).

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Understanding Research Ethics: How to Prevent Plagiarism

Session Agenda

Responsible conduct of research is quintessential in maintaining scientific integrity. Researchers either intentionally or negligently may adopt questionable research practices leading to detrimental consequences. To minimize the risks and hazards associated with unethical behavior, researchers must be aware of the various types of research misconduct and the ways to avoid these malpractices. Enago in collaboration with Hindawi conducted a joint webinar to uphold scientific integrity by helping research scholars understand the significance of good ethical conduct. We focussed on explaining the most common type of research misconduct—plagiarism and its different forms and have shared effective strategies to prevent it.

Through this session, researchers will have an improved understanding of the following:

• An overview of research and publication ethics
• Importance of research ethics
• Major ethical issues and how to avoid them
• How to draft plagiarism-free manuscripts?
• Legal consequences of IPR violation

About Hindawi ( www.hindawi.com )

Hindawi Limited is one of the world's largest open-access publishers with an expansive portfolio of academic research journals across all areas of science and medicine. Each peer-reviewed journal has been developed in partnership with academic researchers, acting as editors, to fit the targeted communities they serve. Driven by a mission to advance openness in research and placing the researcher at the heart of everything we do, we work with publishers, institutions, and organizations to move towards a more open scholarly ecosystem by investing in the development of open-source publishing infrastructure.

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Research Ethics and Plagiarism

"Research Ethics and Plagiarism"   are  among the key areas under discussion and consideration at various levels. Many students of PG programmes. Research scholars and faculty members of higher education Institutions face problem to resolve the issues related to plagiarism. In 2018, UGC has also notified its norms for plagiarism checking and promoting ethical practices in research and publications. In these norms, Universities/institutions are asked to organize programmes and make these issues as part of their research curriculum. Keeping in mind the vast scope of the area and opportunities for young researchers to learn about research ethics, plagiarism, citation, etc. this online course entitled "Research Ethics and Plagiarism" i s being offered. 

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Dr. Gaurav Singh

Dr.Gaurav Singh is working as a Professor at School of Education, Central University of Haryana. Previously, he has contributed at IGNOU as the coordinator the Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) Programme. He was the Channel Coordinator of SWAYAMPRABHA Channel:32 Teacher Education (A Ministry of Education, Govt. of India Project) July 2016-June 2020, and of Channel 20: SOUs and Teacher Education under SWAYAMPRABHA till September 05, 2022. Dr.Gaurav Singh has done M.Sc. in Chemistry, M.Ed. (Gold Medallist), UGC-NET (Education) and Ph. D. in Teacher Education and also completed PGDDE (Gold Medal). He started his career as teacher educator in 2003 in a conventional teacher education Institute and worked with School of Education, IGNOU from November 2011 to September 04, 2022. His 31 (Thirty-One) research papers/ articles have been published so far in various National and International Journals/books. He has also contributed more than 40 chapters/units to ODL Study Material. He has recorded/developed 125 modules/lectures for MOOCs till date and coordinated the development of nearly 1200 lectures for SWAYAM and SWAYAMPRABHA. He has authored one book on Teacher Education and guided one Ph.D. on E-learning. Dr. Singh has participated in various International and National Seminars in India as well as abroad. He has also completed one NIOS funded Research Project as Co-Researcher on Educational Status of Purvi Uttar Pradesh. He is offering four MOOCs on SWAYAM and on other platforms. Nearly 45000 learners have benefited from these courses so far. His SWAYAM course on Research Ethics and Plagiarism has been adopted by nearly forty universities in their Ph.D. Course work curriculum, and under top ten SWAYAM courses of all time, as per the learners rating on class central. Dr.Gaurav Singh is the recipient of Commonwealth of Learning-AAOU Fellowship-2018 by COL, Vancouver, Canada. He has been conferred silver medal of Best Practices by Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU), 2018 at Hanoi, Vietnam and is recipient of Distinguished Distance Educator Award by National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS), Noida. He has also got travel assistance to attend Pan Commonwealth Forum (PCF-10) from COL at Athabaska University Calgary, Canada in 2022. His SWAYAM course on Learning and Teaching has been awarded as the Best SWAYAM course in 2021. Dr. Gaurav Singh is continuously engaged in delivering lectures/talks and organizing training workshops as MOOC trainer at various universities, TLCs, HRDCs and teacher education Institutions. He has been part of various academic bodies, curriculum committees of several Institutions and Universities. His areas of interests are Research Methodology, ICTs in Education/ODL and Teacher Education.

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