Plagiarism at crossroads

Abstract

Considered in academia a serious offence, plagiarism is an act of copying or stealing someone else’s ideas or work and presenting them as one’s own [1]. In a broader sense, plagiarism is using an author’s words, ideas, reflections and thoughts without properly acknowledging them [2]. A well-known and growing issue in academia, plagiarism constitutes a significant proportion of the serious deviations from ethical research practice [3]. The advancement of technology and the widespread use of the Internet and the emerging AI assistance available for all have made it easier to commit plagiarism. Yet, on the flip side, avoiding plagiarism is now more convenient due to the abundance of plagiarism detection tools. Plagiarism applications generate a similarity report that highlights potential manifestations of plagiarism. The accuracy of plagiarism checker tools and their reports on determining the academic integrity of emerging academic writing contents becomes questionable due to the contradicting nature of the concerned variables of plagiarism tool algorithms and that of academic writing ethics. Academic writing ethics taught across global curriculums places a significant value on the use of duly cited direct quotations (verbatim copies) as a strong evidential strategy while plagiarism reports count textual similarity as a key 52 variable to flag plagiarism.