Between citation, authorship and plagiarism in the scientific writing of graduate students

Abstract

In this paper, our objective is to address the relationship between citation, authorship and plagiarism in the scientific writing of graduate students, specifically focusing on the examination of voice management problems that indicate the occurrence of plagiarist practices in this writing. Based on papers that discuss issues of voice management, authorship and plagiarism and guided by an interpretative perspective of research and a qualitative approach, we analyzed scientific articles produced by students of the Masters in Linguistics and Literature. The analysis of the corpus confirms that graduate students still present serious difficulties in the management of voices in scientific writing, manifesting plagiarist practices that point out from ignorance of citing conventions to the conscious omission of sources of the other‟s saying. The paper points out the need for postgraduate education professionals to incorporate pedagogies that more effectively explore the multiple forms and enunciative functions of citations in scientific texts.