1 Academic Integrity
Academic integrity is the foundation of science
“Academic integrity is built on honesty, respect and fairness. Students, faculty and staff at UVic are members of an intellectual community. As such, it’s expected that we’ll adhere to ethical values in all our learning, teaching and research.”
Plagiarism is a departure from academic integrity by presenting someone else’s work as your own. In science, ideas matter, so theft of ideas is a serious form of fraud.
To avoid plagiarism, make sure that sources of ideas and work in your written work and presentations are properly cited. Write in your own words or quote, and cite.
- Citing sources gives credit to the intellectual work of others. It recognizes the work that others have done.
- Citing sources helps other scientists find your source information.
- Others can then read the source information and see how your ideas fit with others in discussing the subject.
INTEGRITY IN ACTION
The following is an excerpt from the University of Victoria’s Academic Integrity Policy.
“Academic integrity requires commitment to the values of honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility. It is expected that students, faculty members and staff at the University of Victoria, as members of an intellectual community, will adhere to these ethical values in all activities related to learning, teaching, research and service. Any action that contravenes this standard, including misrepresentation, falsification or deception, undermines the intention and worth of scholarly work and violates the fundamental academic rights of members of our community. This policy is designed to ensure that the university’s standards are upheld in a fair and transparent fashion.
Students are responsible for the entire content and form of their work. Nothing in this policy is intended to prohibit students from developing their academic skills through the exchange of ideas and the utilization of resources available at the university to support learning (e.g., The Centre for Academic Communication). Students who are in doubt as to what constitutes a violation of academic integrity in a particular instance should consult their course instructor.”
Self-Plagiarism
In academia, there is a growing problem of self-plagiarism. The Editors of the journal ACS Nano, citing an article by University of Calgary professor Irving Hexham, described the effect on the scientific community:[1]
“Recycling old data as new material (the accomplishment or quality), when it is not so, is tantamount to attempting to deceive one’s audience.”
Why is it plagiarism if it’s your own ideas or data? The point is that it is fraud, a deliberate deception of the reader. It creates distrust and leads to a poor reputation, and also contributes to overloading the peer review process. The ACS Nano article details several examples of self-plagiarism, summarized below:
- Copying several paragraphs verbatim or slightly rewritten from an earlier manuscript.
- Using identical schematics or figures as those use in earlier papers.
- Data augmentation and/or repackaging to look like a new set of results.
- Submitting related and overlapping content to several journals at once.
- Dawn A. Bonnell, Jillian M. Buriak, Jason H. Hafner, Paula T. Hammond, Mark C. Hersam, Ali Javey, Nicholas A. Kotov, Peter Nordlander, Wolfgang J. Parak, Andrey L. Rogach, Raymond E. Schaak, Molly M. Stevens, Andrew T. S. Wee, C. Grant Willson, and Paul S. Weiss. Recycling Is Not Always Good: The Dangers of Self-Plagiarism. ACS Nano 2012 Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1-4 https://doi.org/10.1021/nn3000912
