Plagiarism and academic integrity in science

Abstract

The review presents an analysis of contemporary literary data on the problem of plagiarism and violations of the standard codes of scholarly conduct and ethical principles, as well as methods to combat them. Academic integrity includes a set of spiritual values such as honesty, justice, trust, respect, and responsibility, as well as ideal samples which all the participants of the scientific and educational processes should follow. Violations of the principles of academic integrity are a number of incorrect actions performed by any participant of scientific or educational process. Plagiarism is an element of misconduct in academic sphere. The category of scientific plagiarism includes obvious and unobvious scientific plagiarism. The specific aspects of the problem are self-plagiarism and mosaic plagiarism. The developed anti-violation strategies and recommendations should provide guidelines and instructions for improving the level of academic knowledge of all the participants of scientific and educational processes. A modern and effective method for combating plagiarism is online text detection for originality, although this technique is not free from shortcomings. The fight against academic misconduct should be carried out on the national level: including but not limited with gaining new knowledge, training skills, and formation of professional and general cultural values at all the levels of scientific and educational processes. Further development of universal training modules which provide information on the goals of academic integrity, the most frequent reasons that lead to its violation, types of violations, how to deal with them, and possible consequences is requested. Such reference data should be widely available; introduction of new knowledge and control on implementation of its key provisions should be an integral part of modern Russian academic education.