engleski

Prevalence of Plagiarism among Medical Students

Aim. To determine the existence and the rate of plagiarism among medical students with regard to the student's sex, their exam grade, source article availability, theme complexity and the clear warning that plagiarism is forbidden. Subjects and methods. During two academic years 198 second year medical students wrote an essay as part of their Medical Informatics course, based on one of four offered articles that could been used as a theme source. Two of these source articles were available in electronic form and two only as a "hard" copy. One of them was less complex and the two others were more complex. The essays were examined using plagiarism detection software "WCopyfind". The program obtained the number of matching words counted from phrases that matched six or more words within the original text. The percentage of text that was actually plagiarized was calculated from the total and the matching words count. Results. The average rate of plagiarism in essays was 19%. Students who were strictly warned not to plagiarize had a higher total words count in their essays than students who were not warned (p=0.016), but there was no difference between them according to the rate of plagiarism. Students with higher exam grades plagiarized less compared to those who got lower grades (p=0.007). Sex, theme source and the complexity had no influence on the rate of plagiarism. Only 9% of students did not plagiarize at all and 34% plagiarized less than 10% of the text in their essays. Conclusions. Plagiarism is present among medical students. An explicit warning is not enough to deter students from plagiarism.

medical education; intellectual property; copyright; plagiarism; scientific misconduct; medical schools

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