Plagiarism in South African management journals

Abstract

Plagiarism by academics has been relatively unexplored thus far. However, there has been a growing awareness of this problem in recent years. We submitted 371 published academic articles appearing in 19 South African management journals in 2011 through the plagiarism detection software program Turnitin™. High and excessive levels of plagiarism were detected. The cost to government of subsidising unoriginal work in these journals was calculated to approximate ZAR7 million for the period under review. As academics are expected to role model ethical behaviour to students, such a finding is disturbing and has implications for the reputations of the institutions to which the authors are affiliated as well as that of the journals that publish articles that contain plagiarised material.

Faculty reluctance to report student plagiarism: A case study

“…Elliott et al (2013) highlight the existence of faculty cheating in the forms of self-plagiarism, data fabrication and data manipulation, and the addition of their names or those of colleagues to publications in spite of minimal intellectual contribution. In a study of 371 articles published in 19 South African management journals in 2011, Thomas and de Bruin (2015) report that 48.5% of the articles contained similarity of 15% or more to other published works. These authors note the negative impact of such practices on the academic culture and environment within which students study.…”

Plagiarism in South African management journals: A follow-up study

“…The objective of the study was to identify the extent of plagiarism in articles published in 2016 in 19 South African management journals and to compare the findings to those of a similar study 53 based on articles published in the same 19 journals in 2011. The general finding was that plagiarism has increased from the 2015 study to the current study.…”

Plagiarism, Replication of Published Material without Citation and the Policy of the European Management Review

“…These elements include the idea that there is an intention by one author to misappropriate somebody else's thoughts, ideas, intellectual frameworks, results and words without proper acknowledgement of the source (Gotterbarn et al ., ; Enders and Hoover, ; Bedeian et al ., ; Poon and Ainuddin, ; Honig and Bedi, ; Amos, ; Lenz, ; Pupovac and Fanelli, ; Ayondele et al ., ; Smart and Gaston, ). As plagiarism involves denying recognition to another person whose ideas are being used, Thomas and de Bruin, ; see also Haviland and Mullin, ) describe it as ‘intellectual theft’. Given that ideas are central to the academic enterprise as well as to academics' careers, this behaviour is deemed to take on great weight and undermine the core of an academic's life (Poff, ; Pupovac and Fanelli, ).…”

“…Plagiarism, although of only recent interest in academic publishing (Smart and Gaston, ), has been gathering reported momentum in management and cognate disciplines (Bedeian et al ., ; Poon and Ainuddin, ; Honig and Bedi, ; Sonfield, ; Thomas and de Bruin, , p. 78; Karabag and Berggren, ; Ayondele et al ., ; Horbach and Halffman, ). Hitherto, the evidence is inconsistent, possibly because of variations in definitions and the use of different methods of evidence collection.…”

“…Whilst we are sympathetic to the pressures that many academics face, often without adequate institutional support; in our role as editorial team members of a learned journal, it is incumbent on us to protect the integrity of knowledge creation and dissemination, as well as respect the copyrights enshrined in published articles. We are entrusted as gate keepers by the academic communities we serve and implicitly assumed to uphold the value of intellectual contributions to the highest standard by the public at large, policy makers and funding agencies included (Bedeian et al ., ; Stenmark et al ., ; Poon and Ainuddin, ; Honig and Bedi, ; Thomas and de Bruin, ). Of course, there are costs involved in journals seeking to detect plagiarism and questions have been asked whether those costs are too high when it may not be possible to impose sufficiently meaningful sanctions on those who perpetrate damaging practices (Gotterbarn et al ., ; Poff, ).…”