Abstract

Purpose - In general, researchers try to abide by the code of research ethics, but many of them are not fully aware of plagiarism, unintentionally committing the research misconduct when they write a research paper. This research aims to introduce researchers a clear and easy guideline at a conference, which helps researchers avoid accidental plagiarism by addressing the issue. This research is expected to contribute building a climate and encouraging creative research among scholars. Research design, data, methodology & Results - Plagiarism is considered a sort of research misconduct along with fabrication and falsification. It is defined as an improper usage of another author's ideas, language, process, or results without giving appropriate credit. Plagiarism has nothing to do with examining the truth or accessing value of research data, process, or results. Plagiarism is determined based on whether a research corresponds to widely-used research ethics, containing proper citations. Within academia, plagiarism goes beyond the legal boundary, encompassing any kind of intentional wrongful appropriation of a research, which was created by another researchers. In summary, the definition of plagiarism is to steal other people's creative idea, research model, hypotheses, methods, definition, variables, images, tables and graphs, and use them without reasonable attribution to their true sources. There are various types of plagiarism. Some people assort plagiarism into idea plagiarism, text plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, and idea distortion. Others view that plagiarism includes uncredited usage of another person's work without appropriate citations, self-plagiarism (using a part of a researcher's own previous research without proper citations), duplicate publication (publishing a researcher's own previous work with a different title), unethical citation (using quoted parts of another person's research without proper citations as if the parts are being cited by the current author). When an author wants to cite a part that was previously drawn from another source the author is supposed to reveal that the part is re-cited. If it is hard to state all the sources the author is allowed to mention the original source only. Today, various disciplines are developing their own measures to address these plagiarism issues, especially duplicate publications, by requiring researchers to clearly reveal true sources when they refer to any other research. Conclusions - Research misconducts including plagiarism have broad and unclear boundaries which allow ambiguous definitions and diverse interpretations. It seems difficult for researchers to have clear understandings of ways to avoid plagiarism and how to cite other's works properly. However, if guidelines are developed to detect and avoid plagiarism considering characteristics of each discipline (For example, social science and natural sciences might be able to have different standards on plagiarism.) and shared among researchers they will likely have a consensus and understanding regarding the issue. Particularly, since duplicate publications has frequently appeared more than plagiarism, academic institutions will need to provide pre-warning and screening in evaluation processes in order to reduce mistakes of researchers and to prevent duplicate publications. What is critical for researchers is to clearly reveal the true sources based on the common citation rules and to only borrow necessary amounts of others' research.