Plagiarism is the act of taking credit for someone else’s work or idea, with or without their consent and incorporating it into one’s work without full acknowledgement.1 Plagiarism could be in different forms such as verbatim quotation, cutting and pasting from the internet, inappropriate paraphrasing, inaccurate citation, self-plagiarism amongst others. Plagiarism matters because it is a breach of academic integrity. Intellectual honesty is a sacred principle that underlies academia such that one is obliged to acknowledge the originators of ideas, words and data which forms the basis for one’s work. Plagiarism is highly unethical and can have serious consequences on a researcher’s career, institution, and other academic affiliations.
A meta-analysis conducted on publications about scientists admitting to plagiarism reported about 1.7% of scientists admitted to have self-plagiarised at one time or the other, while about 30% admitted to knowing a colleague who had plagiarised.2 A recent systematic review and survey of African medical journals for plagiarism in the research was conducted using Turnitin text-matching software. The software generated an overall similarity index (OSI) and the number of sentences copied in each of the articles selected. The authors reported a form of plagiarism in 63% of the articles checked, with 27% being level 1 (some plagiarism – involving one or two sentences), 19% being level 2 (moderate plagiarism – three to six sentences) and 17% being level 3 (extensive plagiarism – six or more sentences).3 The authors also reported 47% plagiarism in the introduction section, 30% in the methods, and 39% in the discussion section. There was little or no widespread plagiarism in the results section of included articles.3 While this report has its limitations which only included articles from the African Journals Online (AJOL) database, there appears to be obvious evidence of substantial plagiarism.