With the surge of the Internet, access to information has become quite easy. Most of the published academic material on a topic — including books, papers and related articles — can easily be searched and followed online. This has brought a need for the academics to draw a policy in order to utilize the available published work in a legitimate manner.
It is this need that has thus resulted in something known to us as an academic integrity statement or policy. In this context, a published material is the copyright of an author which should be acknowledged wherever it is utilized.
Students now-a-days, are encouraged to conduct literature review as a part of a given assessment or otherwise. The easiest and most common approach would be the use of the Internet to obtain related information. However, what is not taught or explained is the necessity to acknowledge and cite some work and refrain from violating the intellectual propriety right of the reported work.
Referring an author work in one’s report has a long history. At the same time, professional misconduct also finds its roots in the same history.
It is a common practice to integrate research with various taught modules. However, there seems to be complete absence of any explanation as to how reported materials may be used to develop further understanding and knowledge of a topic without being misused. Thus, we need to come up with a way where we can distinguish poor practice from an unfair approach.
What is important to mention is that students still are not quite clear as to how an academic piece of work is cited in one’s work. Sometimes, it happens that students unknowingly use others’ work in a way which may fall into the category of dishonest approaches. In addition to this, less or no use of appropriate software to detect copyright issue of a published work make things more complicated.
This concept differs from one region to another and awareness about copyrights of a published work varies. Thus, in some places using some one’s work may take the form of showing respect to the author without actually citing his work. This problem takes an even uglier turn when students from one country pursue higher education in another country where strict rules and policies are in place to examine a submitted work.
It is therefore important to create a general understanding of this matter among different educational boards. Such objective can be achieved through proper guiding and articles focusing on integrity and intellectual rights of the published work.
It is a positive sign that academic institutions have introduced academic integrity policy to develop a fair understanding and awareness among the students of different regions on this issue. Students must be informed how knowledge of any published work can be used and how it cannot be misused.
