No evidence of age-related increases in unconscious plagiarism during free recall

In three experiments younger and older participants took part in a group generation task prior to a delayed recall task. In each, participants were required to recall the items that they had generated, avoiding plagiarism errors. All studies showed the same pattern: older adults did not plagiarise their partners any more than younger adults did. However, older adults were more likely than younger adults to intrude with entirely novel items not previously generated by anyone. These findings stand in opposition to the single previous demonstration of age-related increases in plagiarism during recall.     

THE FORUM

Internet plagiarism continues unabated and may even be increasing. Questions pertaining to the ethical-moral construct employed by students to justify Internet plagiarism among high school students have remained relatively untouched. Understanding not simply the prevalence of Internet plagiarism but also the variety of explanations used by students to justify their plagiarism seems crucial to curtailing its practice. In this study, I surveyed 160 high school students and endeavored to understand and describe the practices of students who use the Internet for schoolwork and who engage in copy-paste plagiarism or paper-buying practices. The results indicate that students are more easily able to justify copy-paste plagiarism for a variety of reasons that mirror justifications of other forms of conventional plagiarism. Most students indicated they would never purchase a paper for reasons ranging from fear of getting caught to more principled and nuanced ethical claims. Based on these results I also offer educators suggestions for refining assignments and evaluation methods.     

Retractions in the Engineering Field: A Study on the Web of Science Database

This study assesses the retractions of scientific articles in engineering journals indexed on the Web of Science from 1945 to 2015. The data set was built based on documents containing the keywords retracted, retraction, withdrawal, or redress. We used database exploration techniques, including Structured Query Language and analysis of variance, for data analysis. We analyzed 238 retractions published by 117 journals. The most common reason for retraction was unethical research, and higher impact factors journals tended to publish more retractions. In conclusion, most of the analyzed retractions were the result of unethical research and were retracted by editors.     

Are We on the Same Page? College Students’ and Faculty’s Perception of Student Plagiarism in Taiwan

The rapid development of the Internet has granted college students easy access to vast amount of online resources, and to some degree has increased the chances of plagiarism problems. A number of studies have suggested that both faculty’s and students’ perceptions toward plagiarism are found to be influential on students’ plagiarizing behaviors, and limited research has been done to explore the perceptional differences between these two roles. This study aims to respond to the growing educational concerns about plagiarism by comparing the perceptions held by faculty and college students. A total of 229 faculty and 634 college students in Taiwan completed the Perceptions of Student Plagiarism Questionnaire designed for the study. The results reveal that faculty held stricter standards than those of students. Results also indicate various causes of plagiarism, such as no interest in the learning subjects, lack of citation knowledge, or lack of research ability. Furthermore, significant disciplinary differences were shown to contribute to students’ plagiarism perception; the results reveal that most students with an Arts or Communication major held a relatively adverse thinking toward plagiarism. Last, this study provides research-based strategies for school and faculty to reduce the likelihood of plagiarism.     

Scientific societies and whistleblowers: the relationship between the community and the individual

Formalizing shared ethical standards is an activity of scientific societies designed to achieve a collective goal of promoting ethical conduct. A scientist who is faced with the choice of becoming a “whistleblower” by exposing misconduct does so in the context of these ethical standards. Examination of ethics policies of scientific societies which are members of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) shows a breadth of purpose and scope in these policies. Among the CSSP member societies, some ethics policies chiefly present the ethical culture of the community in an educational context and do not have enforcement procedures. Other policies are more comprehensive and include standards for certification, procedures for addressing ethical issues, and established sanctions. Of the 36 member societies of CSSP that have developed a code or adopted a code of another professional society, 18 specifically identified a responsibility to expose ethical misconduct, demonstrating an acknowledgment of the possible critical role of the whistleblower in addressing ethical issues. Scientific societies may revise their ethics codes based upon experience gained in addressing cases of ethical misconduct. In most cases, the action of a whistleblower is the initial step in addressing an ethics violation; the whistleblower may either be in the position of an observer or a victim, such as in the case of someone who discovers that his or her own work has been plagiarized. The ethics committee of a scientific society is one of several possible outlets through which the whistleblower can voice a complaint or concern. Ethical violations can include falsification, fabrication, plagiarism and other authorship disputes, conflict of interest and other serious violations. Commonly, some of these violations may involve publication in the scientific literature. Thus addressing ethical issues may be intertwined with a scientific society’s role in the dissemination of new scientific results. For a journal published by a scientific society, the editor can refer at some point to the ethics committee of the society. Whereas, in the case of a journal published by a commercial publisher, the editor may be without direct support of the associated scientific community in handling the case. The association of a journal with a scientific society may thus direct a whistleblower towards addressing the issue within the scientific community rather than involving the press or talking to colleagues who may gossip. A formal procedure for handling ethics cases may also discourage false accusers. Another advantage of handling complaints through ethics committees is that decisions to contact home institutions or funding agencies can be made by the ethics committee and are not the responsibility of the whistleblower or the editor of the journal. The general assessment is that the establishment of ethics policies, especially policies covering publication in society journals, will promote a culture supportive of whistleblowers and discouraging to false accusers. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium entitled “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: What the Scientific Community Can Do About Whistleblowing” held during the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Seattle, Washington, 15 February, 1997.     

Seven ways to plagiarize: handling real allegations of research misconduct

As the research integrity officer at my university for two years, I handled eight allegations of plagiarism. These eight cases show that initial appearances can be mistaken, that policies for handling allegations of research misconduct cannot cover every contingency, and that many cases can be resolved collegially without resort to formal procedures. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, February 28 – March 3, 2002, Cincinnati, Ohio. The views, opinions, and recommendations expressed in this paper are not necessarily those of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.     

On the capacity to suffer one's self

Problems in the establishment of the sense of a ‘psychic’ skin, in the ways described by Bick and Meltzer for example, commonly give rise to distortions in the capacity for self‐experiences as a consequence of difficulties in relation to projective and identificatory processes. These latter may acquire a markedly adhesive character as a defence against the anxieties that arise. This makes for considerable technical difficulties in an analysis. This essay addresses the nature of these problems and considers some of the ways in which they may be approached clinically.     

Chinese University Students’ Perceptions of Plagiarism

This study examines Chinese undergraduates’ perceptions of plagiarism in English academic writing in relation to their disciplinary background (i.e., hard vs. soft disciplines), academic enculturation (i.e., length of study in university), and gender. Drawing on data collected from 270 students at two universities in China, it finds clear discipline-based differences in participants’ knowledge of plagiarism and perceptions about its causes; an enculturational effect on perceived acceptability of and condemnatory attitudes toward plagiarism, with senior students being less harsh than their junior counterparts; and complex interactions among disciplinary background, length of study, and gender. Furthermore, it reveals conceptions of (il)legitimate intertextuality (i.e., textual borrowing) differing from those prevalent in Anglo American academia and clearly punitive stances on perceived plagiarism. These results suggest the need to take an educative rather than punitive approach to source use in English academic writing.     

Using a Two-Tier Test to Examine Taiwanese Graduate Students’ Misunderstanding of Responsible Conduct of Research

The present study investigates Taiwanese graduate students’ general understanding and misunderstanding of Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). A total of 580 graduate students responded to the self-developed Responsible Conduct of Research Reasoning Test. The results reveal that, first, students did not have sufficient knowledge to reason why a particular instance of research (mis)conduct was doable or not. Second, the statistical results show that female students, students majoring in the humanities or the social sciences, doctoral-level students, and students with RCR-related training outperformed others. In addition, the misbehaviors that students judged relatively uncritically comprise the following nine categories: (a) seeing authorship as a property or power, (b) misinterpreting research coauthors’ responsibilities, (c) inaccurately conducting the informed-consent process, (d) fabricating and falsifying research data, (e) misinterpreting the correct citation of research sources, (f) holding vague concepts of self-plagiarism, (g) misinterpreting the Taiwan Copyright Act, (h) accepting duplicate-publication practices, and (i) accepting piecemeal publication practices. The present study discusses participative students’ major misunderstandings of actual RCR-related practices. The study also presents further implications and suggestions based on the findings.     

To Cheat or Not to Cheat?: The Role of Personality in Academic and Business Ethics

Past research (Lawson, 2004 Lawson, R. A. 2004. Is classroom cheating related to business students’ propensity to cheat in the "real world"?. Journal of Business Ethics, 49: 189–199. doi:10.1023/B: BUSI.0000015784.34148.cb[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Nonis &; Swift, 2001 Nonis, S. and Swift, C. O. 2001. An examination of the relationship between academic dishonesty and workplace dishonesty: A multicampus investigation. Journal of Education for Business, 77: 69–77. doi:10.1080/08832320109599052[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) has revealed a correlation between academic and business ethics. Using a sample survey, this study extends this inquiry by examining the role of dispositional variables (neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness) and academic honesty on business ethics perceptions. Results indicate that (1) neuroticism and conscientiousness were positively related to more ethical perceptions in a work context, and (2) academic honesty partially mediated the relationship between conscientiousness and business ethics. Implications to business practitioners and educators are discussed as well as directions for future research.