Plagiarism In Literature

2.1. Plagiarism in Academic Products

Plagiarism, that is using the words or ideas of another person and passing them off as one’s own (Carroll, 2007), is considered as a “cardinal sin” in academia (Papadakis & Wofsy, 2010, p.1). This is a widespread problem today that is increasing and can be vastly observed among scholarly communities, scientific communities, literary communities as much as among educators, politicians, journalists and public figures all over the world (Onuoha & Ikonne, 2013; Flint, Clegg & Mcdonald, 2006; Park, 2003; Seppanen, 2002; Marsden, 2001).

Several high-profile scandals involving plagiarism by prominent writers, novelists, university professors and politicians have recently captured the public's attention

and Canadian campuses, McCabe (2005) also surveyed around 80,000 students over three years from 2002 to 2005 and reported 38% of undergraduates and 25% of graduate students self-reporting their cases of plagiarism. The results of a survey published in Education Week also proved that in 2012, 54% of the students admitted plagiarizing from the Internet and 74% of the students admitted that they had been engaged in serious cases of cheating at least once during the past school year (Plagiarism.org, 2012).

This is while, in many cases, plagiarism of ideas, authorship, buying essays or even ready-made dissertations or articles specially written for a person by somebody else cannot be detected (Martin, 2004).

Therefore, although the findings of the above studies as well as many other published papers are indicative of high percentage of plagiarism commitment among the academics, many researchers still believe that plagiarism rates are likely higher than the numbers generally reported (Selwyn, 2008).

Regarding the consequences of the academics' resort to plagiarism, it is worth mentioning that "at worst, intentional forms of plagiarism represent outright cheating and raise questions about the validity of the higher education degrees that are awarded; and at best, unintentional plagiarism threatens academic integrity and student learning" (Ehrich, Howard, Tognolini & Bokosmaty, 2015,

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Marsden (2003) also referred to around 200 studies done on different types of academic dishonesty in the past 75 years.

Talking about plagiarism, it is very important to know that plagiarism is a complex issue about which there are many uncertainties and the line between acceptable and unacceptable is difficult to trace (Henriksson, 2008). It is an elusive concept treated differently in different contexts (Angélil-Carter, 2000).

Relatively no universally agreed definition is shared among the researchers; the institutions develop their own definitions and the individuals interpret it differently in their applications (Neville, 2007; Colin, 2007; Leak, 2006).

“Different groups of people from various academic levels and of different disciplines across different countries have differing views regarding plagiarism, its definitions, and its legal or ethical issues” (Rezanejad and Rezaei 2013,