Within academia, plagiarism by students, professors, or researchers is considered academic dishonesty or academic fraud, and offenders are subject to academic censure, up to and including expulsion. Many institutions use plagiarism detection software to uncover potential plagiarism and to deter students from plagiarizing. However, the practice of plagiarizing by use of sufficient word substitutions to elude detention software, known as rogeting, has rapidly evolved as students and unethical academics seek to stay ahead of detection software. An extreme form of plagiarism, known as contract cheating involves students paying someone else, such as an essay mill, to do their work for them.
In journalism, plagiarism is considered a breach of journalistic ethics, and reporters caught plagiarizing typically face disciplinary measures ranging from suspension to termination of employment. Some individuals caught plagiarizing in academic or journalistic contexts claim that they plagiarized unintentionally, by failing to include quotations or give the appropriate citation. While plagiarism in scholarship and journalism has a centuries-old history, the development of the Internet, where articles appear as electronic text, has made the physical act of copying the work of others much easier.
Predicated upon an expected level of learning/comprehension having been achieved, all associated academic accreditation becomes seriously undermined if plagiarism is allowed to become the norm within academic submissions.
For professors and researchers, plagiarism is punished by sanctions ranging from suspension to termination, along with the loss of credibility and perceived integrity. Charges of plagiarism against students and professors are typically heard by internal disciplinary committees, by which students and professors have agreed to be bound. Plagiarism is a common reason for academic research papers to be retracted.
Academia
No universally adopted definition of academic plagiarism exists; however, this section provides several definitions to exemplify the most common characteristics of academic plagiarism.
According to Bela Gipp academic plagiarism encompasses:
"The use of ideas, concepts, words, or structures
without appropriately acknowledging the source
to benefit in a setting where originality is expected."
The definition by B. Gipp is an abridged version of Teddi Fishman's definition of plagiarism, which proposed five elements characteristic of plagiarism. According to T. Fishman, plagiarism occurs when someone:
- Uses words, ideas, or work products
- Attributable to another identifiable person or source
- Without attributing the work to the source from which it was obtained
- In a situation in which there is a legitimate expectation of original authorship
- In order to obtain some benefit, credit, or gain which need not be monetary
Furthermore, plagiarism is defined differently among institutions of higher learning and universities:
- Stanford sees plagiarism as the "use, without giving reasonable and appropriate credit to or acknowledging the author or source, of another person's original work, whether such work is made up of code, formulas, ideas, language, research, strategies, writing or other form."
- Yale views plagiarism as the "... use of another's work, words, or ideas without attribution," which includes "... using a source's language without quoting, using information from a source without attribution, and paraphrasing a source in a form that stays too close to the original."
- Princeton perceives plagiarism as the "deliberate" use of "someone else's language, ideas, or other original (not common-knowledge) material without acknowledging its source."
- Oxford College of Emory University characterizes plagiarism as the use of "a writer's ideas or phraseology without giving due credit."
- Brown defines plagiarism as "... appropriating another person's ideas or words (spoken or written) without attributing those word or ideas to their true source."
Common forms of student plagiarism
According to "The Reality and Solution of College Plagiarism" created by the Health Informatics department of the University of Illinois at Chicago there are 10 main forms of plagiarism that students commit:
- Submitting someone's work as their own.
- Taking passages from their own previous work without adding citations.
- Re-writing someone's work without properly citing sources.
- Using quotations, but not citing the source.
- Interweaving various sources together in the work without citing.
- Citing some, but not all passages that should be cited.
- Melding together cited and uncited sections of the piece.
- Providing proper citations, but fails to change the structure and wording of the borrowed ideas enough.
- Inaccurately citing the source.
- Relying too heavily on other people's work. Fails to bring original thought into the text.
Sanctions for student plagiarism
In the academic world, plagiarism by students is usually considered a very serious offense that can result in punishments such as a failing grade on the particular assignment, the entire course, or even being expelled from the institution. Generally, the punishment increases as a person enters higher institutions of learning. The seriousness with which academic institutions address student plagiarism may be tempered by a recognition that students may not fully understand what plagiarism is. A 2015 study showed that students who were new to university study did not have a good understanding of even the basic requirements of how to attribute sources in written academic work, yet students were very confident that they understood what referencing and plagiarism are. The same students also had a lenient view of how plagiarism should be penalised.
For cases of repeated plagiarism, or for cases in which a student commits severe plagiarism (e.g., purchasing an assignment), suspension or expulsion is likely. There has been historic concern about inconsistencies in penalties administered for university student plagiarism, and a plagiarism tariff was devised in 2008 for UK higher education institutions in an attempt to encourage some standardization of approaches.
However, to impose sanctions, plagiarism needs to be detected. It has been found that a significant share of (university) teachers does not use detection methods such as using text-matching software. A few more try to detect plagiarism by reading term-papers specifically for plagiarism, while the latter method might be not very effective in detecting plagiarism - especially when plagiarism from unfamiliar sources needs to be detected.
Plagiarism education
Given the serious consequences that plagiarism has for students, there has been a call for a greater emphasis on learning in order to help students avoid committing plagiarism. This is especially important when students move to a new institution that may have a different view of the concept when compared with the view previously developed by the student. Indeed, given the seriousness of plagiarism accusations for a student's future, the pedagogy of plagiarism education may need to be considered ahead of the pedagogy of the discipline being studied. The need for plagiarism education extends to academic staff, who may not completely understand what is expected of their students or the consequences of misconduct.
Factors influencing student´s decision to plagiarize
Several studies investigated factors that influence the decision to plagiarize. For example, a panel study with students from German universities found that academic procrastination predicts the frequency plagiarism conducted within six months followed the measurement of academic procrastination. It has been argued that by plagiarizing students cope with the negative consequences that result from academic procrastination such as poor grades. Another study found that plagiarism is more frequent if students perceive plagiarism as benefitial and if they have the opportunity to plagiarize. When students had expected higher sanctions and when they had internalized social norms that define plagiarism as very objectionable, plagiarism was less likely to occur.
Journalism
Since journalism relies on the public trust, a reporter's failure to honestly acknowledge their sources undercuts a newspaper or television news show's integrity and undermines its credibility. Journalists accused of plagiarism are often suspended from their reporting tasks while the charges are being investigated by the news organization.
Self-plagiarism
The reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one's own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or citing the original work is sometimes described as "self-plagiarism"; the term "recycling fraud" has been used. Articles of this nature are often referred to as duplicate or multiple publication. In addition there can be a copyright issue if copyright of the prior work has been transferred to another entity. Typically, self-plagiarism is only considered a serious ethical issue in settings where someone asserts that a publication consists of new material, such as in publishing or factual documentation. It does not apply to public-interest texts, such as social, professional, and cultural opinions usually published in newspapers and magazines.
In academic fields, self-plagiarism occurs when an author reuses portions of his own published and copyrighted work in subsequent publications, but without attributing the previous publication. Identifying self-plagiarism is often difficult because limited reuse of material is accepted both legally (as fair use) and ethically.
The concept
The term "self-plagiarism" has been challenged as being self-contradictory, an oxymoron, and on other grounds.
For example, Stephanie J. Bird argues that self-plagiarism is a misnomer, since by definition plagiarism concerns the use of others' material.
However, the phrase is used to refer to specific forms of putatively unethical publication. Bird identifies the ethical issues of "self-plagiarism" as those of "dual or redundant publication." She also notes that in an educational context, "self-plagiarism" refers to the case of a student who resubmits "the same essay for credit in two different courses." As David B. Resnik clarifies, "Self-plagiarism involves dishonesty but not intellectual theft."
According to Patrick M. Scanlon
"Self-plagiarism" is a term with some specialized currency. Most prominently, it is used in discussions of research and publishing integrity in biomedicine, where heavy publish-or-perish demands have led to a rash of duplicate and "salami-slicing" publication, the reporting of a single study's results in "least publishable units" within multiple articles (Blancett, Flanagin, & Young, 1995; Jefferson, 1998; Kassirer & Angell, 1995; Lowe, 2003; McCarthy, 1993; Schein & Paladugu, 2001; Wheeler, 1989). Roig (2002) offers a useful classification system including four types of self-plagiarism: duplicate publication of an article in more than one journal; partitioning of one study into multiple publications, often called salami-slicing; text recycling; and copyright infringement.
Codes of ethics
Some academic journals have codes of ethics that specifically refer to self-plagiarism. For example, the Journal of International Business Studies. Some professional organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have created policies that deal specifically with self-plagiarism. Other organizations do not make specific reference to self-plagiarism such as the American Political Science Association (APSA). The organization published a code of ethics that describes plagiarism as "...deliberate appropriation of the works of others represented as one's own." It does not make any reference to self-plagiarism. It does say that when a thesis or dissertation is published "in whole or in part", the author is "not ordinarily under an ethical obligation to acknowledge its origins." The American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) also published a code of ethics that says its members are committed to: "Ensure that others receive credit for their work and contributions," but it makes no reference to self-plagiarism.
Factors that justify reuse
Pamela Samuelson, in 1994, identified several factors she says excuse reuse of one's previously published work, that make it not self-plagiarism. She relates each of these factors specifically to the ethical issue of self-plagiarism, as distinct from the legal issue of fair use of copyright, which she deals with separately. Among other factors that may excuse reuse of previously published material Samuelson lists the following:
- The previous work must be restated to lay the groundwork for a new contribution in the second work.
- Portions of the previous work must be repeated to deal with new evidence or arguments.
- The audience for each work is so different that publishing the same work in different places is necessary to get the message out.
- The author thinks they said it so well the first time that it makes no sense to say it differently a second time.
Samuelson states she has relied on the "different audience" rationale when attempting to bridge interdisciplinary communities. She refers to writing for different legal and technical communities, saying: "there are often paragraphs or sequences of paragraphs that can be bodily lifted from one article to the other. And, in truth, I lift them." She refers to her own practice of converting "a technical article into a law review article with relatively few changes--adding footnotes and one substantive section" for a different audience.
Samuelson describes misrepresentation as the basis of self-plagiarism. She also states "Although it seems not to have been raised in any of the self-plagiarism cases, copyrights law's fair use defense would likely provide a shield against many potential publisher claims of copyright infringement against authors who reused portions of their previous works."
Organizational publications
Plagiarism is presumably not an issue when organizations issue collective unsigned works since they do not assign credit for originality to particular people. For example, the American Historical Association's "Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct" (2005) regarding textbooks and reference books states that, since textbooks and encyclopedias are summaries of other scholars' work, they are not bound by the same exacting standards of attribution as original research and may be allowed a greater "extent of dependence" on other works. However, even such a book does not make use of words, phrases, or paragraphs from another text or follow too closely the other text's arrangement and organization, and the authors of such texts are also expected to "acknowledge the sources of recent or distinctive findings and interpretations, those not yet a part of the common understanding of the profession."