Attitudes towards academic plagiarism in medicine students from private and public universities

Abstract

Introduction: the development of the knowledge society, the information society and the rise of information and communication technologies (ICT) facilitate the multi-literacy of a student; however, they also facilitate and exploit academic and intellectual fraud. Objective: to know the student perception about plagiarism in research papers. Methods: descriptive, observational, cross-sectional study on the perception of plagiarism in students of public and private faculties of health sciences in Asunción. Results: of 139 students, 68 (49%) corresponded to public faculties. Between 51% and 69% carried out research work at least once in their university career, the mean age of the sample was 21 ± 3 years (range: 17–40 years). As for extracting information from the internet without referring to the author_ there is a significant difference (p= 0.006) between public and private faculties: public: 38.2% sometimes do it, and 61.8% never do it. And the private ones: 56.3% sometimes do it, 38% never and 5.6% always do it. Most of the students refer that academic plagiarism is always carried out in the schools. The students state that measures must be implemented to avoid academic plagiarism in these percentages: between 64.6% and 73.5% must always be reported; cancel the research between 52.1% and 75%. Both measures present a significant difference between the public and private faculties (p<0.05). Discussion: in general, the perception of plagiarism among medical students is present, and they identify the concept of plagiarism. The causes are multifactorial from both the student and the teacher. There must be a penalty for authors who plagiarize, accompanied by awareness workshops at the initial levels of education, to avoid this practice.