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Academic Plagiarism: Explanatory Factors from Students’ Perspective

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Abstract

The study of academic plagiarism among university students is at an embryonic stage in Spain and in the other Spanish-speaking countries. This article reports the results of a research, carried out in a medium-sized Spanish university, based on a double method approach—quantitative and qualitative—concerning the factors associated with academic plagiarism from the students’ perspective. The main explanatory factors of the phenomenon, according to the results obtained, are: a) aspects and behaviour of students (bad time management, personal shortcomings when preparing assignments, the elevated number of assignments to be handed in, etc.); b) the opportunities conferred by information and communication technologies to locate, copy and paste information; and, finally, c) aspects related to professors-lecturers and/or the characteristics of the subject-course (lecturers who show no interest in their work, eminently theoretical subjects and assignments, etc.).

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Notes

  1. This study focuses on intentional academic plagiarism: knowingly submitting—with the purpose of deceiving- texts, ideas, hypotheses, assignments, etc. belonging to other people as if they were one’s own. We do not take into account what has come to be known as inadvertent academic plagiarism, which is nearly always generated by using incorrect quotations and paraphrases in assignments or by not directly quoting an author due to a lack of knowledge of the practices and norms related to style (Comas and Sureda 2007).

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Acknowledgements

This article was written in the framework of the Research project financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Spanish Government (MCI), entitled “El ciberplagio entre el alumnado universitario”, with reference SEJ2006-10413. The authors are grateful to the MCI for the support received. Authors also want to thank Dr. Miguel Roig for his suggestions and style correction done on the document.

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Correspondence to Rubén Comas-Forgas.

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Comas-Forgas, R., Sureda-Negre, J. Academic Plagiarism: Explanatory Factors from Students’ Perspective. J Acad Ethics 8, 217–232 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-010-9121-0

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