Discuss the motivations for plagiarism and the ways of avoiding suspicions of plagiarism.

Question

What will be an ideal response?What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

It may seem depressing to end a book on research methods with a section on plagiarism, but it would be irresponsible to avoid the topic. Of course, you may have a course syllabus detailing instructor or university policies about plagiarism and specifying the penalties for violating that policy, so we’re not simply going to repeat that kind of warning. You probably realize that the practice of selling term papers is revoltingly widespread (our search of term papers on Google returned over 2 million websites on June 3, 2015); so we’re not going to just repeat that academic dishonesty is widespread. Instead, we will use this section to review the concept of plagiarism and to show how that problem connects to the larger issue of the integrity of social research. When you understand the dimensions of the problem and the way it affects research, you should be better able to detect plagiarism in other work and avoid it in your own.
Plagiarism -- Presenting as one’s own the ideas or words of another person or persons for academic evaluation without proper acknowledgment.
You learned in Chapter 3 that maintaining professional integrity—honesty and openness in research procedures and results—is the foundation for ethical research practice. When it comes to research publications and reports, being honest and open means avoiding plagiarism—that is, presenting as one’s own the ideas or words of another person or persons for academic evaluation without proper acknowledgment (Hard, Conway, & Moran, 2006). In essence, plagiarism is a form of stealing.
An increasing body of research suggests that plagiarism is a growing problem on college campuses. For example, Hard et al. (2006) conducted an anonymous survey in one university and found very high plagiarism rates: 60.6% of students reported that they had copied “sentences, phrases, paragraphs, tables, figures or data directly or in slightly modified form from a book, article, or other academic source without using quotation marks or giving proper acknowledgment to the original author or source”, and 39.4% reported that they had “copied information from Internet [websites] and submitted it as [their] work”.
The plagiarism problem is not just about purchasing term papers—although that is really about as bad as it gets (Broskoske, 2005); plagiarism is also about what you do with the information you obtain from a literature review or an inspection of research reports. However, rest assured that this is not only about student papers; it also is about the work of established scholars and social researchers who publish reports that you want to rely on for accurate information. Several noted historians have been accused of plagiarizing passages that they used in popular books; some have admitted to not checking the work of their research assistants, to not keeping track of their sources, or to being unable to retrieve the data they claimed they had analyzed. Whether the cause is cutting corners to meet deadlines or consciously fudging facts, the effect is to undermine the trustworthiness of social research.
A primary way to avoid plagiarism is to maintain careful procedures for documenting the sources that you rely on for your own research and papers, but you should also think about how best to reduce temptations among others. After all, what people believe about what others do is a strong influence on their own behavior (Hard et al., 2006).
Reviewing the definition of plagiarism and how it is enforced by your discipline’s professional association is an important first step. These definitions and procedures reflect a collective effort to help social scientists maintain standards throughout the discipline. Awareness is the first step (American Sociological Association [ASA], 1999). In addition, your college or university also has rules that delineate its definition of and consequences for plagiarism.
Researchers have an obligation to be familiar with their code of ethics (and other applicable ethics codes) and their application to sociologists’ work. Lack of awareness or misunderstanding of an ethical standard is not, in itself, a defense to a charge of unethical conduct.
ASA’s (2008) Code of Ethics, which is used by the American Society of Criminology and is similar to that of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, includes an explicit prohibition of plagiarism:
14. Plagiarism
(a) In publications, presentations, teaching, practice, and service, sociologists explicitly identify, credit, and reference the author when they take data or material verbatim from another person’s written work, whether it is published, unpublished, or electronically available.
(b) In their publications, presentations, teaching, practice, and service, sociologists provide acknowledgment of and reference to the use of others’ work, even if the work is not quoted verbatim or paraphrased, and they do not present others’ work as their own whether it is published, unpublished, or electronically available.
The next step toward combating the problem and temptation of plagiarism is to keep focused on the goal of social research methods: investigating the social world. If researchers are motivated by a desire to learn about social relations, to study how people understand society, and to discover why conflicts arise and how they can be prevented, they will be as concerned with the integrity of their research methods as are those, like yourself, who read and use the results of their research. Throughout this text, you have been learning how to use research processes and practices that yield valid findings and trustworthy conclusions. Failing to report honestly and openly on the methods used or sources consulted derails progress toward that goal.
It works the same as cheating in school. When students are motivated only by the desire to ace their tests and receive better grades than others, they are more likely to plagiarize and use other illicit means to achieve that goal. Students who seek first to improve their understanding of the subject matter and to engage in the process of learning are less likely to plagiarize sources or cheat on exams (Kohn, 2008). They are also building the foundation for becoming successful social researchers who help others understand our world.