Techno-plagiarism

Dear Sir

Meetings are important for educational development. New technology is exciting, inevitably with technological advancements come new challenges, academia being no exception. Plagiarism is a problem in research and technology to a certain extent makes it easier and worse which here is referred to as ‘Techno-plagiarism.’

The problems of ‘self-plagiarism’ and ‘ghost authorship’ are well recognised (McCuen 2008) among academics today. However, conference presentations bring new challenges with e-posters and power point presentations being universal. Globally, there is a dependence on mobile phones and their various applications, which are at the disposal of the user. The cameras, voice typing software and video recording options on mobile phones shed new light on techno-plagiarism. Members of an audience nowadays record voices, film and take photographs of presentation slides and posters rather than writing down key points. This use of technology may have a positive impact on the environment by reducing carbon footprints with less paper being used. Nevertheless, because of the use of this recorded research work, sometimes unpublished data has great potential of being used unreferenced and hence plagiarised. Thus, no adequate future referencing of the author or authors’ work may be done or appropriate credit given for intellectual property. Authors therefore depend on the ethical intelligence of their audience when their data is used to be acknowledged and referenced. An alternative is for the author(s) to provide contact details for further information to be obtained.

Techno-plagiarism potentially enables research material to be used not only at a ‘local’ level but also internationally through the World Wide Web. The internet copy and paste phenomenon referred to as ‘cyberplagarism’ (Eysenbach 2000) is still an ongoing problem. Education about plagiarism should be paramount at the undergraduate level and reiterated at the postgraduate level as the pressure to publish papers is ever increasing. With growing awareness and individual professionalism, techno-plagiarism and poor internet referencing in academic writing could be tackled. Plagiarism is considered as unethical practice (McCuen 2008). Clinicians, in particular, do not act in a way to be deceptive towards patients as this would be professional misconduct. This rule should also hold with the use and delivery of research and other scientific information to colleagues. Different types and ways of plagiarism will continue to evolve in today's high-tech era. Therefore, solutions through awareness and possibly conferences rules such as ‘no filming or photography’ during presentations may need to be implemented.