Exploring the attitudes of medical faculty members and students in Pakistan towards plagiarism: a cross sectional survey
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
Abstract
Objective:The objective of this survey was to explore the attitudes towards plagiarism of faculty members and medical students in Pakistan.
Methods:The attitudes toward plagiarism questionnaire (ATPQ) was modified and distributed among 550 medical students and 130 faculty members in 7 medical colleges of Lahore and Rawalpindi. Data was entered in the SPSS v.20 and descriptive statistics were analyzed. The questionnaire was validated by principal axis factoring analysis.
Results:Response rate was 93% and 73% respectively. Principal axis factoring analysis confirmed one factor structure of ATPQ in the present sample. It had an acceptable Cronbach’s alpha value of 0.73. There were 421 medical students (218 (52%) female, 46% 3rd year MBBS students, mean age of 20.93 ± 1.4 years) and 95 faculty members (54.7% female, mean age 34.5 ± 8.9 years). One fifth of the students (19.7%) trained in medical writing (19.7%), research ethics (25.2%) or were currently involved in medical writing (17.6%). Most of the faculty members were demonstrators (66) or assistant professors (20) with work experience between 1-10 years. Most of them had trained in medical writing (68), research ethics (64) and were currently involved in medical writing (64). Medical students and faculty members had a mean score of 43.21 (7.1) and 48.4 (5.9) respectively on ATPQ. Most of the respondents did not consider that they worked in a plagiarism free environment and reported that self-plagiarism should not be punishable in the same way as plagiarism. Opinion regarding leniency in punishment of younger researchers who were just learning medical writing was divided.
Conclusions:The general attitudes of Pakistani medical faculty members and medical students as assessed by ATPQ were positive. We propose training in medical writing and research ethics as part of the under and post graduate medical curriculum.
Cite this as
2015. Exploring the attitudes of medical faculty members and students in Pakistan towards plagiarism: a cross sectional survey. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1127v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1127v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
This version has been accepted for publication at PeerJ.
Sections
Supplemental Information
Attitudes towards plagiarism of medical students and faculty members
Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Farooq A Rathore conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Ahmed Waqas conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Ahmad Marjan Zia conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Martina Mavrinac performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Fareeha Farooq analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Human Ethics
The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):
Permission was obtained from the Institutional review board of CMH Lahore Medical College. Ethical review letter is provided as a supplementary file.
Funding
The authors declare that they had no funding source for this project.
