Review article
Plagiarism as a violation of scientific and academic integrity
Ksenija Baždarić
; Department of Medical informatics, School of Medicine, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Vanja Pupovac
; Department of Medical informatics, School of Medicine, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Lidija Bilić-Zulle
; Department of Medical informatics, School of Medicine, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Mladen Petrovečki
; Department of Medical informatics, School of Medicine, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Abstract
Plagiarism is unauthorized appropriation of other people’s ideas, processes or text without giving correct credit and with intention to present it as own property. Appropriation of own published ideas or text and passing it as original is denominated self-plagiarism and considered as bad as plagiarism. The frequency of plagiarism is increasing and development of information and communication technologies facilitates it, but simultaneously, thanks to the same technology, plagiarism detection software is developing.
There are diff erent software solutions for checking plagiarism. Most of them are based on concordance, i.e., comparison of text where program tools isolate and mark correspondent parts of the
text and calculate its rate regarding the whole text. Several programs, besides comparing the texts, also search the Internet aiming for text with corresponding content. All programs can compare text written in the same language but translingual comparison with plagiarism detection software is not
yet possible. The software is available through computer programs (WCopyfi nd) or Web Services (eTBlast, CrossCheck). Their advantage is in the possibility of fi nding the original source paper.
eTBlast is the free of charge web based service for searching corresponding and highly similar scientific paper abstracts (it searches also Medline database), which served as the ground for constructing Déjà vu database. Web based service CrossCheck is accessible only for members (academic institutions and journals) and by using computer similarity algorithm iThen cate of company iParadigms (Oakland, CA, USA), it checks accordance of the given text with the complete texts in the CrossCheck database. It is organized by collaboration of journal editorial boards and publishers who pass the published papers to the base and enable searching of content usually protected by subscription. The importance of recognizing and teaching plagiarism in the academic community at all levels of education is enormous. Scientific journal editors and scientists should fight together against unethical researches which are opposite to the scientific idea and harmful for scientific community and society, critically read and examine scientific publications, report plagiarism and other suspicious research
misconduct to journal editorial boards and institutional authorities.
Keywords
Bibiliographic Databases; Duplicate Publication; Fraud; Plagiarism; Retraction of Publication; Scientific misconduct
Hrčak ID:
38691
URI
Publication date:
1.6.2009.
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