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academic integrity, on July 31, 2018. This states clearly in the section titled : 2. Definitions under item
3
l: “Plagiarism” means the practice of taking someone else’s work or idea and passing them as one’s own.”
We shall refer to the use of another person’s words as “text-plagiarism”, and the use of another person’s
ideas as “idea-plagiarism”. Text-plagiarism is also referred to as “cut-and-paste plagiarism”, and is
easily detected by commercially available software that detects text-similarity.

This UGC Notification ensures the use of software that check for text similarity of submitted
manuscripts with existing literature, a practice that established journals also regularly follow. The use
of such software should serve as a pre-emptive measure, and no future manuscript submitted from a
Higher Education Institute (HEI) in India should be guilty of cut-and-paste, or text-plagiarism. There
are no similar definitive measures to ensure that submitted manuscripts are free of idea-plagiarism.

The UGC Notification sets up Academic Integrity Panels to investigate complaints of plagiarism, and
stipulates penalties in cases where plagiarism is established. The penalties recommended are graded
according to the level of plagiarism, and can range from minor penalties to termination of service. It
is thus imperative to ensure that our research publications are free of all kinds of plagiarism.

Text-Plagiarism or Cut-and-paste Plagiarism

One must put in some effort, using commercially available software that are reputed to check for
text-similarity against the widest possible database (it must be remembered that many research
publications are behind pay-firewalls, cannot be easily accessed, and the software has to pay money to
access these), to ensure that one has not, even accidentally and inadvertently, reproduced something
that one read at some point in time and that got embedded in the subconscious. It is possible that
one bypasses some software checks while submitting a manuscript, but one must remember that,
“Hobbyists and political opponents have made a cottage industry out of searching the back catalogues
of high-profile individuals for evidence of such misdeeds.” (Chaddah, 2014, op. cit.) This targeting
of individuals by non-experts is also worrisome because accidental text-plagiarism may be used
as a ‘weapon’. You are open to scrutiny for posterity, and social media will highlight the plagiarism
allegations pertaining to your old work when you achieve prominence later in life! My considered
advice is that one must be generous and give credit wherever it is due, rather than paraphrase and
avoid giving credit (Chaddah, 2018).

Self-plagiarism

There is also a possibility of repeating a string of one’s words when one is pursuing a novel idea and
doing a series of research projects. This is termed as self-plagiarism. This is different from multiple
publication of the same research work. It is unfortunately often used to target high-profile individuals.
To ensure that we are not victims of this accusation of “self-plagiarism”, we must refer to our earlier
work not just to avoid charges of self-plagiarism, but more importantly to highlight our continuing
and sustained contribution (ibid.). We must take special care when we report some results at a
Conference, and then include them in a subsequent submission to a journal.

The Ethics of Using Text From Earlier Works

How does one use text from an earlier published work, whether it is authored by others or by one-
self, so that it does not amount to plagiarism? The first basic criterion is that one must give credit to
the earlier work, and it should be obvious to any reader that one is giving such credit. “Plagiarism-

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