The process of writing a dissertation can be quite challenging. Given that your research is central to your educational and professional goals, you might find yourself feeling especially anxious when it comes to writing your thesis. The pressure of meeting your supervisor’s expectations, the need to create original and thorough research, and the prospect of earning a
PhDs are all enough to make anyone feel uneasy about the work they are doing. That’s why it’s no surprise that PhD students often experience some degree of stress related to their academic work. With this in mind, you may have wondered whether plagiarism is more common among PhD students than other researchers.
Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else’s ideas or words without citing them properly. It can take many forms, from copying and pasting small sections of text from websites without referencing them, to incorporating large sections of text directly from another source without referring back to where you found it first. This article will explore the policy standards of plagiarism in Indian doctoral thesis.
What is the Government Mandate?
The Central government has taken strong steps to keep a check on such practices of plagiarism in PhD research. The core work carried out by the author shall be based on original ideas and shall be covered by Zero Tolerance Policy on Plagiarism, notice that the mandate extends only to the core work - this comprises of abstract with keywords, introduction, objective, hypothesis, research methodology, analysis and interpretation, summary and observations, conclusions, recommendations and references.
Classification
UGC's new anti-plagiarism policy allows up to 10% content similarity.
Level 1: With content similarity above 10%, the students are expected to withdraw their manuscript and are barred from any sort of publication for a minimum period of 1 year.
Level 2: If the plagiarized content is infected with 40% to 60% content duplicity, then the academicians must be subjected to a denial of one annual increment and barred to publish any work for a minimum period of 2 years
Level 3: When encountered with more than 60% of content similarity with the original sources, withdraw manuscript submitted for publication and shall not be allowed to publish any work for a minimum period of three years with the faculty supervision in-charge denied the right to two successive annual increments and shall not be allowed to be a supervisor to any UG, PG, Master's, M.Phil., Ph.D. student/scholar for a period of three years.
The plagiarism found can be claimed under the Plagiarism Disciplinary Authority (PDA) for necessary and maximum penalty. The accusations shift to legal action when the accused denies the claim of plagiarism under the copyright norm.
UGC has further clarified when the researcher should resort to citation standards to avoid piracy of intellectual property and actively credit and acknowledge the contribution of others. The directive states that:
If the researcher has appropriated at least 10 words together from the core research or study of any other work, they must cite it. The common forms of citation include:
APA (American Psychological Association) is used by Education, Psychology, and Sciences.
MLA (Modern Language Association) style is used by the Humanities.
Chicago/Turabian style is generally used by Business, History, and the Fine Arts.
If the above collection of another's core work amounts to 40 words, then the entire fragment of text is to be kept under inverted comma (“_”) in italic and is cited with the part taken to be a direct quotation from the source of work.
The extent of using citation is not regulated when it comes to open internet sites which do not require to be cited but if the bulk of your research, i.e. 30 percent in aggregate during plagiarism detection is from an open internet source, then it too shall be put to a review.
Patchwriting, means “restating a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the. language or syntax of the source”. This is a practice in contradiction to paraphrasing which is an acceptable way to incorporate someone else’s ideas or research into your writing unlike patchwriting which is considered a violation of academic integrity and is susceptible to be recorded as plagiarism.
The formulation of idea and argument cannot be seen as new if the words are merely changed with synonyms and reordered, this is patchwriting unlike paraphrasing which substantially changes the structure of the text. In research writing paraphrased content is also cited in accordance with the style incorporated, but, they are not put within inverted commas (“_”) in italic. The government has turned to software like Turntin, which is also now used by most universities in India among a few others to check for plagiarism, it would be advisable to researchers to proofread your document and check for plagiarism with such software prior to actual submission.