Exploring Nobel laureates’ practice of text borrowing

Abstract

Plagiarism is not an issue observed only among students; rather, it also occurs in the publications of researchers in academic journals. The current study explored how Nobel laureates, with the highest possible academic status in the world, engage in text borrowing. A list of 91 laureates in physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, and economics from 2006 to 2015 were identified and their publications were collected and analysed using Turnitin software. The findings of the current study revealed that Nobel laureates’ journal publications outperform those of their counterparts in terms of text borrowing, even though there are still incidences of extensive text borrowing and the lack of appropriate citations observed in their publications. Most of the text borrowing in question consists of self-plagiarism and methods section text, in agreement of earlier research findings. In addition, papers by authors whose affiliated institutions are located in English-speaking countries exhibit fewer incidences of text borrowing than papers by authors whose affiliated institutions are located in non-English-speaking countries, whereas the number of authors does not play a significant role in text borrowing.

Keywords:

• Plagiarism
• self-plagiarism
• paraphrasing
• academic misconduct

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan.

Notes on contributors

Yu-Chih Sun

Yu-Chih Sun is a professor at the Institute of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Her research interests include writing for publication, academic ethics, plagiarism, and computer-assisted language learning.