Objectives: With the rise in the number of published papers in the biomedical field, plagiarism has become a major ethical concern as it has a direct effect on the quality of these papers. The objective of this research was to determine the perceptions of medical students towards plagiarism, the reasons students engage in plagiarism, the types of plagiarism, the consequences of plagiarism, and solutions to the problem of plagiarism.
Methods: This is a cross-sectional study conducted in two medical colleges in Rawalpindi, Pakistan from June to September, 2018, using self-administered structured questionnaires.
Results: Of the 1100 participants, up to 86.91% (n=956) were not aware of the existence of plagiarism, but the majority, i.e. 71.18% (n=783) have plagiarised the work of others before. Copying from colleagues or senior students is the most common type of plagiarism that medical students engage in owing to the ease with which fellow students’ work can be shared and copied. However, a lack of institutional awareness of the extent to which plagiarism exists, poor vigilance in detecting it, and the absence of clear policies to deal with plagiarism are mostly to blame.
Conclusion: Plagiarism is common among medical students in developing countries, and it is necessary to create awareness about the consequences of engaging in this unethical practice both in the academic field and in the larger medical research society, in order to reduce its prevalence.
How to cite this:Javaeed A, Khan AS, Khan SH, Ghauri SK. Perceptions of plagiarism among undergraduate medical students in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Pak J Med Sci. 2019;35(2):---------. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.35.2.33
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Objective: To assess the relationship between the educational environment and academic performance of undergraduate medical students of Azad Kashmir.
Methodology: A cross-sectional study was done, including 324 undergraduate medical students. The study was conducted from September 2018 to September 2019 at Poonch Medical College, Rawalakot, Azad Kashmir. Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure questionnaire was used as the data collection tool. It is a 50 five-point Likert scale questionnaire divided into five domains that identify issues in learning environments. It was distributed electronically to all 500 students, out of them, 324 completed and returned (response rate of 64.8%).
Results: The mean Dundee Ready Education Environment score, teaching view of learners score, teacher view of learners score, scholarly self-perception of learners score, atmospheric perception of learners, and cultural self-perception of learners scores for all respondents were 96.31 ± 18.47, 27.85 ± 6.80, 25.13 ± 5.90, 21.10 ± 4.44, 27.47 ± 6.60, and 15.98 ± 3.69 respectively. The Dundee Ready Education Environment score was not significantly correlated with academic performance. The subdomain mean scores were also not significantly correlated with academic performance. However, weak correlations between some of the specific items of the questionnaire and academic performance were observed. Academic performance was significantly higher among females (p .002).
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