Plagiarism: An academic theft

Abstract

I have read the editorial note titled ‘Plagiarism: an editor’s concern’ by Dr Javed Ali and found it a bold and great decision by IJPI. Plagiarism is a serious contravention in modern age academic writing and research and has turned into a serious problem. Though there is no absolute definition for plagiarism, according to James M Nugent ‘Plagiarism, like shoplifting and smoking marijuana, is wrong, and it is a corruption of academic life, and we should do what we can to end it.’[1] However, we must differentiate between similarity index and plagiarism. Most of the software like iThenticate (http://www.ithenticate. com), Viper (http://www.scanmyessay.com/plagiarism-free- software), Turnitin (https://turnitin.com/static/index) available for detecting plagiarism do not actually detect plagiarism rather detect similarity index. Similarity index is the reflection of the total percentage of matched words that a system finds for a submission.[2] Similarity index also detects some very common word like E-mail IDs, phone numbers, address of academic affiliation etc., even if appeared in an article by the same authors.