br />Franklyn-Stokes and Newstead (1995) found that 64 per cent of students questioned
reported they had copied work with knowledge, while 66 per cent paraphrased without
references and 54 per cent copied without using references.
In 2003, I asked 64 third-year diploma and ten degree nursing students I was teaching
about plagiarism. Fifty per cent of the diploma students and 30 per cent of the degree
students said they had at some stage intentionally or unintentionally paraphrased material
in an assignment without referencing the source. Twenty per cent of the diploma students
said they had intentionally or unintentionally copied material directly into an assignment
without referencing the source, but none of the degree students said they had.
This enquiry was impromptu and not rigorous, which may account for the degree students
responses to the second question. Even so, that the students were willing to acknowledge
they had plagiarised should alert us to the fact that nursing students are no different to
other students when it comes to plagiarism. A proper study would be useful to gauge the
extent of the problem in nursing education. Should a student who has plagiarised be
awarded grades or given a professional qualification achieved partially or wholly from the
work of others?
Ryan (1998) reports that reference to non-existent books or articles is commonplace in the
US. In almost 30 years of teaching I have only once been aware of the inclusion in an
essay of a non-existent reference source. I discovered the students invention of the
fictional author because the citation was so interesting that I tried to locate the original
article. I realised, after fruitless searches, that the quotation that seemed so noteworthy had
been made up and no such article existed. While this may not be plagiarism in strict terms,
the false reference was included by the student with the intention to deceive.
Cheating academics
Cheating in universities is not confined to the student population. Some lecturers are also
guilty of similar offences. It is important to acknowledge the lead given by medical
colleagues in this area, and in particular to recognise the openness of editors of medical
journals in acknowledging that fraud and misconduct in medical research and publication
not only exist but are a major problem. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) was
formed in 1997 as a sounding board for editors who suspected that data had been falsified
or fabricated (COPE 2001).
As a journal article and book reviewer, the author is aware of the need to be constantly
vigilant for plagiarised, falsified or fabricated work. In the world of nursing publication the
fraudsters are not likely to be students but academics, clinicians, researchers and managers,
because they are the major contributors to journals and books.
Institutionalised plagiarism is described as a feature of systems of formal hierarchy in
which credit for intellectual work is more a consequence than a cause of unequal power
and position (Mitroff and Bennis 1989). In other words, it occurs when a superior, because
of his or her position, gets the credit for the work of a subordinate. Martin (1994) writes
that this includes ghostwriting, when the actual writing is done by someone else; honorary
authorship, where a supervisor who has done little or no research is listed as co-author of
the article; or where work done by junior workers is commonly signed by more senior
academics.
Competitive plagiarism is found in academic and intellectual circles … claiming credit for
ideas is the basis of status and advancement in a system based on autonomous and
individual intellectual production. in this context plagiarism [is] gaining undue credit in a
competitive intellectual endeavour (Martin 1994). The temptation is great because the
rewards are so great.
The line between institutionalised and competitive plagiarism is not always clear and there
may be overlap and inconsistencies, such as seniors who demand their name on every
publication, which would be institutionalised plagiarism in a competitive setting, as Martin
(1994) describes it.
As one American student commented, with some justification: If the [university] president
can use a ghostwriter, why cant I? Indeed the problem of using one standard for college
students and another for public officials at the very least imposes a rather perverse
situational ethics on the whole idea of literary honesty (Hawley 1984).
The practice of putting your name to a piece of work when you have had little or no input
is so extensive in academic and research communities that it is often regarded as the norm.
Looking at the number of multi-authored articles published in journals, many claim to be
written by more than 15 authors.
There is pressure to publish and to be cited by other authors. In Logue (1996) I refer to
informal citation circles, where individuals agree to cite each others work. The more
frequently your name appears as co-author enhances the chances of being cited. A practice
common in all hierarchies, including nursing, is the ghostwriting of conference speeches or
other presentations for a superior, without any reference being made by the presenter to the
true author.
Most plagiarism by university students that is discovered and with which the student is
confronted by his or her lecturer is word-for-word plagiarism, which is easy to detect and
prove. The source of the plagiarised text is often so well known that any recourse to
available plagiarism software is hardly necessary. However, much of this type of
plagiarism is inadvertent because the student often does not understand proper
acknowledgement practice. It should be stressed as Babble (1998) states: There is nothing
wrong with presenting someone elses words and ideas … in fact, any field of thought
evolves as people read each others ideas … the key to doing this properly lies in
acknowledgement and citation.
Where does the problem start?
According to Dant (1986) and Schab (1972), the experience in the US is that students are
taught in high school to copy from sources without acknowledgement, and the problem
persists. From experience it is clear that a large number of college students are ignorant of
proper referencing techniques when they begin their student nursing courses.
The form of student assessment in further education might also be a factor. A five-year
study in the UK by Newstead (1996) found that cheating is more common in coursework
than examinations and that it appears to start in school, where coursework is an important
component of GCSEs. Newstead maintains that the practice was bound to increase as
universities replaced examinations with less stressful continuous assessment.
Students are encouraged to put information into their own words or paraphrase the words
of someone else. However, simply rearranging the order of the views expressed, or
changing some of the words, does not alter the fact that the ideas come from another
source and therefore attribution should be given to the original source.
From personal experience over many years, this problem appears to have increased
dramatically in nursing education as a consequence of students working together on
assignments, studying together, undertaking joint seminar presentations or other group
activities or even living together while undertaking the same course and being expected to
present individual pieces of work for assessment. When a spouse, partner or friend is a
more senior student and shares the knowledge and results of assignments he or she has
previously undertaken the problem also arises.
Culwin and Naylor (1995) describe a continuum–from co-operation, which is encouraged,
through collaboration, which they reluctantly accept, to copying, which is unacceptable.
They define cooperation as talking about a problem or sharing ideas, collaboration as
showing or sharing material that might be included in the final version, and copying as
presenting material that was written by another person. It may, however, be difficult for
some to see where co-operation ends and collusion begins. Culwin and Lancaster (2001)
make the point that many tutors have noted that the position on the continuum which
divides acceptable from unacceptable behaviour is to some extent culturally defined and
hence must be made explicit to all students at the start of their courses.
Cheat sites and essay banks
The temptation to cheat, whether as an academic or student, is increased, not only by the
ease of editing, cutting and pasting or downloading complete texts and hiding the true
source of the writings, but also by the emergence of websites which, for a fee, will provide
an essay or dissertation or fulfil other course requirements.
Websites offering services such as access to essays or the undertaking of coursework are
responding to market demand. Some sites offering access to essays state that they do not
condone plagiarism and include disclaimers to that effect. However, they also argue that
they cannot prevent it. Some offer a service whereby if you have a university course to
complete or an assignment or a dissertation to write, they will write it all or partly for you.
This work cannot be detected by anti-plagiarism project software because it is customised
and written especially for each student.
Reducing plagiarism
Plagiarism is a global problem, but it must be dealt with at both national and university
level in the UK. In response to the problem the National Plagiarism Advisory Service has
