engleski

Case of Blatant Self-Plagiarism in Academic Community and Issues of Self-Plagiarism among "English as the Second Language"

Abstract. Plagiarism is appropriation of another person's ideas, procedures, results or words without giving appropriate credit and usually claiming it to be one's own. Self-plagiarism is reuse of author's previously published scientific work and passing it of as the original material. Scientific community usually recognizes plagiarism as misbehavior but self-plagiarism tends to be more acceptable and not considered as scientific and academic misconduct. As much as plagiarism is negative, self-plagiarism is not any better. There is one reported and public known case of blatant self-plagiarism in academic community in Croatia. The case involved verbatim copy between Master and PhD thesis written by the same author. The person gained benefits out of this act in a form of scientific and professional advancement. Nevertheless, this fraud was revealed and the legal process of PhD thesis retraction is still under way. It is extremely important to point out cases of self-plagiarism and academic fraud to whole community in order to emphasize the importance of scientific and academic integrity. The campaign against both plagiarism and self-plagiarism should start early in educational process due to the student's willingness to plagiarize as findings of our study on plagiarism among medical students suggests (paper attached). However, there are issues regarding self-plagiarism among "English as a second language" writers. It was our observation that non-native English authors tend to copy/paste parts of their previously published papers more then natives, especially those parts regarding technical sections of research. Seems that self copy/paste activity is performed with no intention to deceive, but they do what is not appropriate – they use previously published sentences already revised and approved by editors of scientific journals or English language editors.

medical education; medical ethics; fraud; intellectual property; copyright; medical informatics; plagiarism; scientific misconduct; medical schools; medical universities

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