Perceptions of plagiarism among PhDs across the sciences, engineering, humanities, and arts: Results from a national survey in Brazil

ABSTRACT

Plagiarism allegations are not rare in the history of science, and credit for prior work was and continues to be a source of disputes, involving notions of priority of discovery and of plagiarism. However, consensus over what constitutes plagiarism among scientists from different fields cannot be taken for granted. We conducted a national survey exploring perceptions of plagiarism among PhD holders registered in the database of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. This survey was sent to 143,405 PhD holders across the fields, in the sciences, engineering, humanities, and arts, with a response rate of about 20%. The results suggest that core principles about plagiarism are shared among this multidisciplinary community, corroborating Robert K. Merton’s observations that concerns over plagiarism and priority disputes are not field specific. This study offers insight into the way plagiarism is perceived in this community and sheds light on the problem for international collaborative research networks. The data focus on a particular research system in Latin America, but, given the cultural similarities that bind most Latin American nations, these results may be relevant to other PhD populations in the region and should provide an opportunity for comparison with studies from other emerging, non-Anglophone regions.

KEYWORDS:

• Plagiarism
• research misconduct
• research integrity
• survey
• quantitative research

Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Jacqueline Leta at the Science Education Program of IBqM/UFRJ for her contribution to the initial stages of the survey design. We are especially indebted to CNPq (grant 486220), mainly to Professor Paulo Sérgio Beirão, at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), for his support during the whole process of implementing the national survey in Brazil. Professor Beirão helped establish the Research Integrity Commission of CNPq in 2011, which he chaired until 2015. It was in his capacity as chair of this Commission that he collaborated to involve many Brazilian PhD holders in this endeavor. At CNPq, we also thank Alerino dos Reis e Silva Filho for his assistance with practical matters related to the operationalization of the survey. We also thank the informatics team at CNPq. Professor Antonio de Figueiredo is also acknowledged. He discussed with some of us possibilities for developing a custom system for the survey, setting up a team to work on the system at Scire/COPPE/UFRJ. Professor Nick Steneck, at the University of Michigan, is also acknowledged for his contribution through early discussions on the project and scope of the study. We thank Professor Rosemary Shinkai, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), for her collaboration to an early stage of the project. Our thanks also go to Gabriel Elias, a former undergraduate student in biomedicine at UFRJ, who, during his training in science communication in the first author’s group contributed to solving some operational issues in the dataset, particularly those related to the corpus generated for qualitative analysis. Professor Gabriella Andrea de Castro Pérez, at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio de Janeiro (IFRJ), is acknowledged for her critical reading of this manuscript and relevant comments. Dr. Carmen Penido, at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), is also acknowledged for her critical reading of the final version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Availability of data and material

Supporting information (SI 1, SI 2, SI 3) is provided as Supplementary Material attached.

Authors’ contributions

Conception and design and/or writing and review of the manuscript

Sonia MR Vasconcelos, Hatisaburo Masuda, Martha Sorenson, Marisa Palacios, Jose Roberto Lapa e Silva, Andre L Pinto (in memoriam)

Data analysis, review of the manuscript

Sonia MR Vasconcelos, Francisco Prosdocimi, Jesus Mena-Chalco, Jose Roberto Lapa e Silva, Adalberto Vieyra, Edson Watanabe, Jose Carlos S Pinto, Mauricio Sant`Ana, Marisa Palacios, Miguel Roig, Andre L Pinto (in memoriam) (early versions)

Dataset organization and validation

Francisco Prosdocimi, Mauricio Sant`Ana, Sonia MR Vasconcelos

Interpretation of data and conclusions - Sonia MR Vasconcelos, Hatisaburo Masuda, Martha Sorenson, Jose Roberto Lapa e Silva, Francisco Prosdocimi, Jesus Mena-Chalco, Adalberto Vieyra, Edson Watanabe, Jose Carlos S Pinto, Mauricio Sant`Ana, Miguel Roig

Ethics approval

Ethics approval is described in the Methods section.

Informed consent

Consent was obtained through the online survey form.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was provided by the Brazilian National Research Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).