Plagiarism and Research Integrity 35
have policies reflecting their perspectives on such guidelines. These cover general
issues such as conflict of interest, authorship, fraud, expenditure of grant monies,
rights and responsibilities, data handling and preservation, consent of experimental
subjects, and plagiarism. There are also discipline-specific guidelines that dictate,
for example, how data may be used or who has access to it. It is the responsibility
of all researchers, including students, to be aware of the policies and guidelines that
apply to their discipline and institution.
Most of these issues concern the conduct of research, but one, plagiarism, con-
cerns how it is presented. Plagiarism is a fundamental issue of academic honesty
and instances of it can provoke strong responses. An underlying cause is that aca-
demics’ reputations are based on what they have written, so that when one person
reuses another’s text it is perceived as a particularly threatening form of theft. It also
has a separate significance in the context of a thesis, because an examiner’s judg-
ment of a student’s work is not just based on what they have done but also on how
the work is presented.
I’m startled when a student expresses a desire, as Dohka did to me recently, to
reuse the background chapter from the work of so-and-so, because, in his view, it so
perfectly encompassed the background he needed to present. Such remarks may be
made in innocence—or rather, ignorance—but they betray two important failures of
thinking. One failure is the idea that someone else’s background could be perfect.
No piece of research, or writing about research, is final or complete. Even if so-and-
so was working on the exact same topic, it is unlikely that it would be impossible to
improve their work. Also, it is hard to see how it could be perfect for a new project;
surely Dohka was not working on a problem that had already been addressed, and
surely new work had appeared in the meanwhile. I am pretty confident that, had
Dohka carefully analyzed the chapter he wanted to copy, he soon would have found
many things he would have done differently.
The second failure is the lack of understanding of the examiner’s point of view.
The examiner wants to understand whether the student is a rounded researcher,
capable of appreciating and interpreting the work of others as well as of undertak-
ing new work. If the background is someone else’s work, how can the student be
assessed? In this context it is important to remember that a background chapter can
be, in its own way, an original contribution, because it may offer a new understand-
ing or synthesis that by itself helps to advance the field.
Plagiarism may of course consist of much less than the reuse of an entire chapter;
one or two hundred words of direct copying would usually be regarded as a breach
of ethical standards sufficient to trigger some form of disciplinary proceedings. Nor
does it matter whether the original material was an academic paper or, say, a web
page; it would still be regarded as copied. Moreover, considering that academics do
a lot of reading, and that your thesis will be examined by one of only a small number
of true experts in your field, it is surprisingly easy to get caught. Developments in
search technology have made the detection of copied material very easy and acces-
sible. Unless clearly attributed and put into quote marks, all of the text in your thesis
should be your own.
However, the text might not necessarily be new. You will have generated some
text for other purposes, in particular for papers completed during the course of your