Exploring the attitudes of medical faculty members and students in Pakistan towards plagiarism: a cross sectional survey

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Abstract

Objective. The objective of this survey was to explore the attitudes towards plagiarism of faculty members and medical students in Pakistan.

Methods. The Attitudes Toward Plagiarism questionnaire (ATP) was modified and distributed among 550 medical students and 130 faculty members in 7 medical colleges of Lahore and Rawalpindi. Data was entered in the SPSS v.20 and descriptive statistics were analyzed. The questionnaire was validated by principal axis factoring analysis.

Results. Response rate was 93% and 73%, respectively. Principal axis factoring analysis confirmed one factor structure of ATP in the present sample. It had an acceptable Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.73. There were 421 medical students (218 (52%) female, 46% 3rd year MBBS students, mean age of 20.93 ± 1.4 years) and 95 faculty members (54.7% female, mean age 34.5 ± 8.9 years). One fifth of the students (19.7%) trained in medical writing (19.7%), research ethics (25.2%) or were currently involved in medical writing (17.6%). Most of the faculty members were demonstrators (66) or assistant professors (20) with work experience between 1 and 10 years. Most of them had trained in medical writing (68), research ethics (64) and were currently involved in medical writing (64). Medical students and faculty members had a mean score of 43.21 (7.1) and 48.4 (5.9) respectively on ATP. Most of the respondents did not consider that they worked in a plagiarism free environment and reported that self-plagiarism should not be punishable in the same way as plagiarism. Opinion regarding leniency in punishment of younger researchers who were just learning medical writing was divided.

Conclusions. The general attitudes of Pakistani medical faculty members and medical students as assessed by ATP were positive. We propose training in medical writing and research ethics as part of the under and post graduate medical curriculum.

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What do mentoring and training in the responsible conduct of research have to do with scientists' misbehavior? Findings from a National Survey of NIH-funded scientists.

Annie S. Anderson, Brian Martinson, Raymond de Vries … (2007)

The authors examine training in the responsible conduct of research and mentoring in relation to behaviors that may compromise the integrity of science. The analysis is based on data from the authors' 2002 national survey of 4,160 early-career and 3,600 midcareer biomedical and social science researchers who received research support from the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The authors used logistic regression analysis to examine associations between receipt of separate or integrated training in research ethics, mentoring related to ethics and in general, and eight categories of ethically problematic behavior. Analyses controlled for gender, type of doctoral degree, international degree, and disciplinary field. Responses were received from 1,479 early-career and 1,768 midcareer scientists, yielding adjusted response rates of 43% and 52%, respectively. Results for early-career researchers: Training in research ethics was positively associated with problematic behavior in the data category. Mentoring related to ethics and research, as well as personal mentoring, decreased the odds of researchers' engaging in problematic behaviors, but mentoring on financial issues and professional survival increased these odds. Results for midcareer researchers: Combined separate and integrated training in research ethics was associated with decreased odds of problematic behavior in the categories of policy, use of funds, and cutting corners. Ethics mentoring was associated with lowered odds of problematic behavior in the policy category. The effectiveness of training in obviating problematic behavior is called into question. Mentoring has the potential to influence behavior in ways that both increase and decrease the likelihood of problematic behaviors.

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PLAGIARISM IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING

Izet Masic (2012)

Scientific publishing is the ultimate product of scientist work. Number of publications and their quoting are measures of scientist success while unpublished researches are invisible to the scientific community, and as such nonexistent. Researchers in their work rely on their predecessors, while the extent of use of one scientist work, as a source for the work of other authors is the verification of its contributions to the growth of human knowledge. If the author has published an article in a scientific journal it cannot publish the article in any other journal h with a few minor adjustments or without quoting parts of the first article, which are used in another article. Copyright infringement occurs when the author of a new article with or without the mentioning the author used substantial portions of previously published articles, including tables and figures. Scientific institutions and universities should,in accordance with the principles of Good Scientific Practice (GSP) and Good Laboratory Practices (GLP) have a center for monitoring,security, promotion and development of quality research. Establish rules and compliance to rules of good scientific practice are the obligations of each research institutions,universities and every individual-researchers,regardless of which area of science is investigated. In this way, internal quality control ensures that a research institution such as a university, assume responsibility for creating an environment that promotes standards of excellence, intellectual honesty and legality. Although the truth should be the aim of scientific research, it is not guiding fact for all scientists. The best way to reach the truth in its study and to avoid the methodological and ethical mistakes is to consistently apply scientific methods and ethical standards in research. Although variously defined plagiarism is basically intended to deceive the reader’s own scientific contribution. There is no general regulation of control of scientific research and intellectual honesty of researchers which would be absolutely applicable in all situations and in all research institutions. A special form of plagiarism is self-plagiarism. Scientists need to take into consideration this form of plagiarism, though for now there is an attitude as much as their own words can be used without the word about plagiarism. If the authors cite their own research facilities already stated then they should be put in quote sand cite the source in which it was published. Science should not be exempt from disclosure and sanctioning plagiarism. In the fight against intellectual dishonesty on ethics education in science has a significant place. A general understanding of ethics in scientific research work in all its stages had to be acquired during the undergraduate course and continue to intensify. It is also important ethical aspect of the publishing industry,especially in small and developing economies,because the issuer has an educational role in the development of the scientific community that aspires to relish so. In this paper author describe his experiences in discovering of plagiarism as Editor-in-Chief of three indexed medical journals with presentations of several examples of plagiarism recorded in countries in Southeastern Europe.

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Prevalence of plagiarism in recent submissions to the Croatian Medical Journal.

Ksenija Baždarić, Lidija Bilić-Zulle, Gordana Brumini … (2012)

To assess the prevalence of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted for publication in the Croatian Medical Journal (CMJ). All manuscripts submitted in 2009-2010 were analyzed using plagiarism detection software: eTBLAST, CrossCheck, and WCopyfind. Plagiarism was suspected in manuscripts with more than 10% of the text derived from other sources. These manuscripts were checked against the Déjà vu database and manually verified by investigators. Of 754 submitted manuscripts, 105 (14%) were identified by the software as suspicious of plagiarism. Manual verification confirmed that 85 (11%) manuscripts were plagiarized: 63 (8%) were true plagiarism and 22 (3%) were self-plagiarism. Plagiarized manuscripts were mostly submitted from China (21%), Croatia (14%), and Turkey (19%). There was no significant difference in the text similarity rate between plagiarized and self-plagiarized manuscripts (25% [95% CI 22-27%] vs. 28% [95% CI 20-33%]; U = 645.50; P = 0.634). Differences in text similarity rate were found between various sections of self-plagiarized manuscripts (H = 12.65, P = 0.013). The plagiarism rate in the Materials and Methods (61% (95% CI 41-68%) was higher than in the Results (23% [95% CI 17-36%], U = 33.50; P = 0.009) or Discussion (25.5 [95% CI 15-35%]; U = 57.50; P < 0.001) sections. Three authors were identified in the Déjà vu database. Plagiarism detection software combined with manual verification may be used to detect plagiarized manuscripts and prevent their publication. The prevalence of plagiarized manuscripts submitted to the CMJ, a journal dedicated to promoting research integrity, was 11% in the 2-year period 2009-2010.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Ahmed Waqas

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): PeerJ

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): PeerJ

Journal ID (pmc): PeerJ

Journal ID (publisher-id): PeerJ

Title: PeerJ

Publisher: PeerJ Inc. (San Francisco, USA )

ISSN (Electronic): 2167-8359

Publication date (Electronic): 18 June 2015

Publication date Collection: 2015

Volume: 3

Electronic Location Identifier: e1031

Affiliations

[1 ]Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Combined Military Hospital , Lahore Cantt, Pakistan

[2 ]CMH Lahore Medical College and Dental College , Lahore Cantt, Pakistan

[3 ]Department for Medical Informatics, University of Rijeka, School of Medicine , Rijeka, Croatia

[4 ]Department of Biochemistry, Fatima Memorial Hospital Medical College , Shadman, Lahore, Pakistan

Article

Publisher ID: 1031

DOI: 10.7717/peerj.1031

PMC ID: 4476128

SO-VID: ed946ab1-5091-49cb-a5a6-6b2ae9ffc9f8

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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

History

Date received : 5 January 2015

Date accepted : 26 May 2015

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The authors declare that they had no funding source for this project.

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What do mentoring and training in the responsible conduct of research have to do with scientists' misbehavior? Findings from a National Survey of NIH-funded scientists.

PLAGIARISM IN SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING

Prevalence of plagiarism in recent submissions to the Croatian Medical Journal.

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