Essay Cheat

The Australian (Australia) June 6, 2007 Wednesday All-round Country Edition Work so nice, they use it twice Brendan O'Keefe FEATURES; Higher Education; Pg. 29 512 words SELF-PLAGIARISM, salami-slicing, textual re-use ... it comes with many names but means one thing: passing off your own old work as original material. And there's plenty of it going on, if one study is an accurate indicator. Six in 10 randomly chosen academics in the social sciences, arts and humanities regularly re-used chunks of their own work, often without mention of its previous publication, the University of South Australia study found. Researchers Tracey Bretag and Saadia Carapiet examined the electronically published works of the 10 academics between 2003 and 2006, comparing authors' papers using the plagiarism detector, Turnitin. Their findings concerned them. Four of the studied authors indulged in ''substantial self-plagiarism'', ranging from 25 per cent to 53 per cent of articles examined. Two others rehashed 3 per cent of the time. ''There are implications for academic standards and integrity. There has been outcry about student plagiarism and in the face of that, this research shows that academics expect students to work to a higher standard than we ourselves do,'' said Dr Bretag, co-founder of the International Journal for Educational Integrity. The issue was important because it called into question the definition of original research. Dr Bretag called for funding bodies such as the Department of Education, Science and Training or the Australian Research Council to consider setting defining guidelines. As the research quality framework loomed, ''academics are under pressure to produce large numbers of papers and I think the risks are that people will be tempted to cut corners'', she said. Studies in Britain, where the RQF model, the research assessment exercise, has been in place since 1986, showed that ''increasing pressure to publish has resulted in author misconduct'' of redundant and duplicate publication. Cut-and-paste was most popular: the six self-plagiarists used the method between 23 per cent and 52 per cent of the time in articles ''resulting in a 'new' publication which contained little original material''. Two concurrent articles by the same author had a 55 per cent text match: the abstracts were the same, save for a few words; the ''method'' section of the paper was a match, bar two words; statistical analysis was identical; an extensive discussion section had just 18 divergent lines, the study found. In a process Dr Bretag and Dr Carapiet call a ''chain of textual re-use'', nearly 20 per cent of one of the original articles (September 2002) found its way into a subsequent article (March 2003), which in turn contributed 2 per cent to a February 2005 article, 8 per cent of which was re-used in August 2005. The February 2005 article contained 5 per cent of material from the original of September 2002. Dr Bretag said: ''Early-career researchers might write just one paper in three years but it is original and they need the funding and the kudos.'' She hoped to follow the study with a cross-disciplinary one and planned to apply for funding for it. Grant-getting lottery -- Page 33 June 5, 2007 ENGLISH MATP Newspaper JOURNAL-CODE: AUS Copyright 2007 Nationwide News Pty Limited All Rights Reserved