"... one in five postgraduate research students had never heard of academic integrity..."

PLoS Med. 2013 Dec;10(12):e1001574. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001574. Epub 2013 Dec 31.

Challenges in addressing plagiarism in education.

Bretag T.

Author information

• Business School, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.

"It is generally assumed that graduate students, having spent at least 15 years in the education system, are conversant with academic integrity requirements and know how to avoid plagiarism[17]; however, it is becoming increasingly apparent that many graduate students are ill-prepared for the challenges of postgraduate study [18],[19] and that breaches of academic integrity policy do occur among this student group [13],[17]. Gilmore et al. [17] found that 42.6% of research proposals by science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduate students contained plagiarism; McCullogh and Holmburg [20] reported 27% plagiarism in master's theses; and Segal et al. [21] found that 5% of medical residency applications had at least one instance of plagiarism. Results from the Academic Integrity Standards Project [4]indicated that one in five postgraduate research students had never heard of academic integrity and two in five postgraduate students said they did not know whether their university had an academic integrity policy."