1. Reframing Plagiarism in Academia 4.0.
- Author
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Stacey, Anthony
- Abstract
The failure to acknowledge the ideas or writing of another and presenting of the ideas or writings of another as if they are one's own are longstanding misdemeanours and challenges in academic writing and publishing. As currently defined, plagiarism is correctly regarded as serious academic misconduct. However, research processes and outputs are now being influenced by: greater access to electronic resources, open access journals, Google scholar and other search engines, plagiarism detection software and other elements of the so-called fourth industrial revolution. It can be argued that these factors are contributing not only to the number of instances of plagiarism, but also how plagiarism is manifest. Within a "normal science" paradigm, as described by Kuhn, it is inevitable that there are substantive overlaps in authors' reviews of literature and prior research. Conventionally, authors are expected to use their own words when reviewing prior research, but mere paraphrasing the words of other authors adds little to no value. In this paper it will be shown that the current definition of plagiarism fosters trivial paraphrasing of other authors, rather than explicit application of that prior knowledge or the synthesis of new understanding from existing knowledge. An underlying assumption of the current definition of plagiarism is that absence of direct attribution implies the author's claim to originality. It will be posited that plagiarism can and should be reframed to exclude implied claims of originality, and to regard readily accessible knowledge as "common knowledge" which therefore requires no direct attribution. Such reframing could weaken the constraints of "normal science", and thereby encourage more efficient research and expedite paradigm shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019
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