Abstract
Plagiarism by academics has been relatively unexplored thus far. However, there has been a growing awareness of this problem in recent years. We submitted 371 published academic articles appearing in 19 South African management journals in 2011 through the plagiarism detection software program Turnitin™. High and excessive levels of plagiarism were detected. The cost to government of subsidising unoriginal work in these journals was calculated to approximate ZAR7 million for the period under review. As academics are expected to role model ethical behaviour to students, such a finding is disturbing and has implications for the reputations of the institutions to which the authors are affiliated as well as that of the journals that publish articles that contain plagiarised material.
Highlights
In 2003, an editorial[1] in this journal alerted readers to the developing concern about misconduct in the sciences, and acknowledged that the extent of such misconduct and its various manifestations were largely unknown
The objective of the study was to investigate the degree of plagiarism evident in articles published in 2011 in South African management journals that attract subsidy from the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET)
South African journals that appeared on the Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS, previously ISI) or the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) lists or on the local list of journals compiled by the DHET, thereby qualifying for subsidy, were included in the study
Summary
In 2003, an editorial[1] in this journal alerted readers to the developing concern about misconduct in the sciences, and acknowledged that the extent of such misconduct and its various manifestations were largely unknown. In 2012, Honig and Bedi[2] published the findings of a study in the prestigious Academy of Management Learning and Education journal in which they examined 279 papers submitted for the 2009 Academy of Management conference. They found that 25% of papers contained some degree of plagiarism, with over 13% evidencing significant plagiarism (defined as comprising 5% or more of the content). They reported that a greater amount of plagiarism appeared to emanate from countries outside North America. As a subcategory of research dishonesty, plagiarism is the representation of the work of another, or one’s own work, without acknowledgement of such work and can include careless paraphrasing, the copying of identical text or providing incomplete references that mislead the reader into believing that the ideas expressed belong to the author of the text.[2,3]
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