Academic Plagiarism: Understanding of Students from the Undergraduate Courses of the Applied Social Sciences Sector at the Federal University of Paraná

Abstract

Academic plagiarism is the act of presenting the knowledge produced by a third party as if it were of his own authorship and without citing the source. It discusses the understanding of undergraduate students of the Applied Social Sciences Sector of the Universidade Federal do Paraná about academic plagiarism. It aimed to investigate the understanding of these students about academic plagiarism. Specifically, it sought to identify what the students of the sector consider academic plagiarism; to verify if the students know the different types of plagiarism; to recognize the implications of academic plagiarism from the students’ point of view. It develops a exploratory quantitative and qualitative research. A bibliographic search on the theme was carried out in the Base de Dados Referenciais de Artigos de Periódicos em Ciência da Informação (Brapci) and Scientific Library On-line (SciELO) databases in order to write the literature review. The research instrument was a questionnaire with 22 objective and Likert scale questions. It concludes that the students understand the definition of academic plagiarism, but most of the respondents do not know the types of plagiarism. Most respondents do not know the implications of committing academic plagiarism, but there is mention of legal and administrative proceedings as the main consequences. It recognizes that universities need to discuss the topic in more depth with students through lectures, events, development of institutional standards and dissemination of standardization manuals to avoid the use of plagiarism.