Plagiarism

Excerpt

The act of plagiarizing is defined as: “To take ideas, writings, etc., from another and pass them off as one's own” [1]. It includes copying the text (of others) without a proper reference or citation. Authors have always been copying other authors, sometimes with serious consequences for the plagiarizer and also for the scientific literature. The recent availability of huge amounts of electronic text has made plagiarism much easier while at the same time also easier to discover by means of plagiarism software. In a recent case, the thesis of The German Secretary of Defence was withdrawn from the University of Bayreuth because of plagiarism. It was documented that out of 393 pages, 270 contained copied text and all together 20% of this thesis was plagiarized. More than 30,000 scientists protested in a letter and subsequently the Secretary of Defence resigned. …