Plagiarism

Written by Ruud van den Heuvel and Gonny Kremers working at the Library of Science of the Radboud University.

According to the ALLEA code good research practices are based on four principles: reliability, honesty, respect and accountability (The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity Revised Edition, 2017). Plagiarism violates these principles. The ALLEA code describes plagiarism as using other people’s work and ideas without giving proper credit to the original source and consequently violating the rights of the original author(s) to their intellectual outputs. Within science this is perceived as scientific misconduct. It does not matter if you literally copy complete texts of someone else’s work or write someone else’s work in your own words (known as paraphrasing), both is considered plagiarism. It can occur that plagiarism is done intentionally, but it is much more common that it happens because of ignorance or sloppiness. Plagiarism is considered scientific fraud and detection will have strong consequences for both a scientist and an academic student.