Dr Mir Anayat
Research misconduct means Fabrication, Falsification, or Plagiarism (FFP) in proposing, performing, 0r reviewing research, or in reporting research results.
Fraudulent research can be:
- Fabrication, falsification of data
- Use and misuse of data
- Misrepresentation of results
Deceit, breach of confidence, gains from unfair or dishonest practices or from pretense—all of these fall under the heading of fraud. In the academic and professional community, fraud also includes fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and other lapses in integrity or trustworthiness. lt also means altering data, misrepresentation of results, and publication of another’s intellectual property as though it were one’s own.
Fabrication and falsification of research results are serious forms of misconduct. it is a primary responsibility of a researcher to avoid either a false statement or an omission that distorts the research record. A researcher must not report anticipated research results that had not yet been observed at the time of submission of the report. In order to preserve accurate documentation of observed facts with which later reports or conclusions can be compared, every researcher has an obligation to maintain a clear and complete record of data acquired. Meticulous record-keeping is a sound scientific practice which provides an accurate contemporaneous account of observations that become a permanent reference for the researcher, who otherwise might not remember several weeks, months, or years later exactly what had been observed or what methods had been used. An accurate record also serves others who may want to replicate the observation or to apply a method to other situations. In addition, it is an aid in allowing the eventual sharing of information with others and as documentation that might disprove any subsequent allegation of fabrication or falsification of data. In many fields of laboratory research, it is standard practice to record data in ink in an indexed permanently bound laboratory notebook with consecutively numbered pages (Guidelines for responsible conduct of research, 2011)
Research integrity requires not only that reported conclusions are based on accurately recorded data or observations but that all relevant observations are reported. lt is considered a breach of research integrity to fail to report data that contradict or merely fail to support the reported conclusions, including the purposeful withholding of information about confounding factors. if some data should be disregarded for a stated reason, confirmed by an approved statistical test for neglecting outliers, the reason should be stated in the published accounts. A large background of negative results must be reported. Any intentional or reckless disregard for the truth in reporting observations may be considered to be an act of research misconduct. Special care must be taken in the use of photo-images not to misrepresent the underlying data.
Other forms of research misconduct:
Dishonesty in publication: Duplicate publication/submission of research findings; failure to inform the editor of related papers that the author has under consideration or “in press”
Improprieties of authorship: A general rule is that an author must have participated sufficiently in the work to take responsibility for its content and vouch for its validity. Improper Assignment of credit, such as excluding others misrepresentation of the same material as original in more than one publication; inclusion of individuals as authors who have not made a definite contribution to the work published; or submission of multi-authored publications without the concurrence of all authors (University of Maryland, Policies and Procedures, 1989)
Misappropriation of on idea: this means appropriating an idea (e.g., an explanation, a theory, a conclusion, a hypothesis, a metaphor) in whole or in part, or with superficial modifications without giving credit to its originator. In the sciences, as in most other scholarly endeavors, ethical writing demands that ideas, data, and conclusions that are borrowed from others and used as the foundation of one’s own contributions to the literature, must be properly acknowledged. The specific manner in which we make such acknowledgement varies from discipline to discipline. However, source attribution typically takes the form of either a footnote or a reference citation.
Plagiarism: “To use someone else’s exact words without quotation marks and appropriate credit; or to use the unique Ideas of someone else without acknowledgment, is known as Plagiarism” Plagiarism is intellectual theft. It occurs when an individual submits or presents the oral or written work of another person as his or her own. (Brusaw et al., 1993)
A simple definition of plagiarism is given by North Western University (2005): ‘submitting material that in part or whole is not entirely one’s own work without attributing those some portions to their correct source’ Plagiarism is stealing other people’s ideas, writings, or inventions and passing them off as one’s own. When using other people’s ideas or writings, make it clear that they are the ‘property’ of their author by showing that you are quoting and giving a precise reference. If a student plagiarizes someone’s work and the theft is discovered, which it almost certainly will be, they can be failed without further question (Holtom &Fisher, 1999).
An obvious example of plagiarism that would meet this definition is where a student takes a complete chapter from a book, changes the authorship, and then submits it as his own work (Biggam, 2008), identifying what counts as plagiarism is not as difficult, or as daunting, as it may appear. Although there are degrees of plagiarism, essentially copying text verbatim without sufficient acknowledgement is plagiarism. What is more problematic is determining when par plagiarism has occurred (i.e. patchwork plagiarism). Although it should be discouraged, it is a lesser form of plagiarism, particularly when the original source is cited; and it probably requires education on your part rather than initial punishment.
The types of plagiarism that students get up to:
– Copying whole paragraphs verbatim
– Copying whole sentences verbatim
– Copying part of a sentence verbatim
– Copying text verbatim — paragraph/sentence/part sentence —
and citing the author, but failing to use quotation marks, Copying text verbatim without sufficient acknowledgement of the actual source(s) is plagiarism, irrespective of whether it occurs in part of a sentence, a complete sentence or a full paragraph. Sufficient acknowledgement means that when you are using someone else’s ideas then you have to cite the author and that when you are using another author’s words then you do two things: Cite the author and place the verbatim text in quotation marks.
Types of Plagiarism:
Type I: Copy& Paste Plagiarism
Type ll: Word Switch Plagiarism
Type III; Style Plagiarism
Type IV: Metaphor Plagiarism
Type V: Idea Plagiarism
[Barnbaum, C. A Student’s Guide to Recognizing It and Avoiding It,(Valdosta State University)
“All language learning is to some extent a process of borrowing others ‘ words and we need to be flexible, not dogmatic, about where we draw boundaries between acceptable or unacceptable textual borrowings”.(Pennycook, 1996)
Self-Plagiarism: Self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse their own previously written work or data in a “new” written product without letting the reader know that this material has appeared elsewhere.
Although in scholarly and scientific writing there are some situations in which some forms of text reuse are acceptable, many other instances in which text and/or data are known to have been reused violate the ethical spirit of scholarly research. The concept of ethical writing, about which this instructional resource revolves, entails an implicit contract between reader and writer whereby the reader assumes, unless otherwise noted, that the material was written by the author, is new, is original and is accurate to the best of the author’s abilities. The available literature on self-plagiarism is concerned with four major problems: The publication of what is essentially the same paper in more than one journal, but without any indication that the paper has been published elsewhere (i.e., redundant and duplicate publication), the partitioning of a large study which should have been reported in a single paper into smaller published studies (i.e., salami-slicing], Copyright infringement, and the practice of text recycling.
From the print edition of Feb 1 to 7, 2017.
