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As part of a larger study, written research proposals were collected from 115 science and engineering master’s and doctoral students and reviewed by SafeAssign™ with approximately one-third of them containing sentences that were plagiarised as previously reported in Gilmore, Strickland, Timmerman, Maher and Feldon (2010). (We use the term plagiarism, but do not imply any intentional deceit by the students.) Here we report on the patterns of plagiarised material in the hope that it will contribute to the growing awareness of the problem of plagiarism in graduate schools as well as provide insight into the causes of plagiarism. Instances of plagiarism were coded as to 1) the type of source material (primary, secondary, technical, or popular literature), 2) the nature of the inappropriate use (directly copied, a few words changed, minor grammar alterations, or attempted but insufficient paraphrasing), 3) where in the proposal (introduction, methods, results, or discussion) the plagiarism appeared, and 4) whether or not the plagiarised information was cited and if it was, whether or not the citation was accurate. Plagiarised text was found in 28% of the proposals. Clustering of certain patterns of behaviour, such as directly copying material from popular literature while paraphrasing information from primary scientific literature, were examined in an attempt to gain insight into the cause of the plagiarism. It is our interpretation that the source of the plagiarism was a lack of familiarity with scientific writing as a genre and lack of awareness of its norms and conventions.

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Plagiarism is a commonly cited problem in higher education, especially in scientific writing and assignments for science courses. Students may not intentionally plagiarize, but may instead be confused about what proper source attribution entails. Much of this confusion likely stems from high school, either from lack of or inconsistent instruction across classes. To determine the extent of plagiarism issues in middle and high school student science papers, the authors surveyed student research reports to evaluate their use of in-text and reference page citations. While most of the students had a reference page, fewer than 35% of high school students properly used in-text citations. Furthermore, 12th grade students did not perform any better than 9th grade students in providing proper citations. A survey of college science faculty showed that they do not feel that students are receiving adequate training in source citation in high school. While proper source citation, including the use of in-text citations, is clearly indicated in state education standards, students may not be receiving consistent instruction for a variety of reasons. At a minimum, teachers and officials who supervise student research projects should ensure that students give proper attribution to their sources. This will avoid the development of bad habits that may be troublesome in college. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]