Plagiarism and research ethics: the UGC Regulations, 2018
Research Methodology · Unit IV · Topic 12 of 12 · 6 min read
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Cases checked to exist. Read the judgment before quoting a holding.
Every case cited here has been checked to exist — the citation resolves and names the right parties. The propositions attributed to each case have not been verified line by line against the judgment. Case names link through to the full judgment: read it before quoting a holding in an examination answer, and never carry a proposition from notes into court on trust.
1. Plagiarism: meaning
Plagiarism is presenting another person’s work, words or ideas as one’s own without acknowledgement. The word comes from the Latin plagiarius, a kidnapper. The UGC Regulations of 2018 define it, in substance, as the practice of taking someone else’s work or idea and passing it off as one’s own. Its forms include:
- direct plagiarism: copying text verbatim without quotation marks and citation;
- mosaic or patchwork plagiarism: stitching together phrases from several sources with minor changes;
- paraphrasing without acknowledgement: the words are changed, the idea is borrowed;
- self-plagiarism: reusing one’s own published work without disclosure;
- citation plagiarism: copying another writer’s references without reading the sources;
- contract cheating: submitting work written by someone else, including work generated by software, as one’s own.
2. The UGC Regulations, 2018
The University Grants Commission (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2018 apply to students, faculty, researchers and staff of higher educational institutions. Their main features:
- Awareness and training: institutions must teach academic integrity and research ethics, and the UGC has since required a course on research and publication ethics in Ph.D. coursework.
- Detection: institutions must use plagiarism-detection software, and every thesis and dissertation must be checked before submission.
- Undertakings: the student submits a declaration that the work is original and has been checked; the supervisor certifies it.
- Repository: theses and dissertations are to be placed in institutional repositories and on the national repository (Shodhganga), which makes copying easier to detect.
- Panels: a Departmental Academic Integrity Panel and an Institutional Academic Integrity Panel examine allegations and recommend penalties.
Exclusions. Similarity in the following is not counted: properly cited quotations, references and bibliography, table of contents, preface and acknowledgements, generic terms, laws, standard symbols and equations, and work used with permission and acknowledgement.
3. Levels and penalties
| Level | Similarity | Students (thesis, dissertation) |
|---|---|---|
| Level 0 | Up to 10% | Minor; no penalty |
| Level 1 | Above 10% to 40% | Revise and resubmit within six months |
| Level 2 | Above 40% to 60% | Debarred from resubmitting for one year |
| Level 3 | Above 60% | Registration for the programme cancelled |
Faculty and researchers (for published or submitted academic work): at Level 1, the manuscript is withdrawn; at Level 2, withdrawal plus denial of one annual increment and a bar on supervising students for two years; at Level 3, withdrawal plus denial of two successive increments and a bar on supervision for three years. Repeated plagiarism attracts the penalty of the next higher level; repetition at the highest level can lead to suspension or termination under the institution’s service rules. Plagiarism in the core of the work — the abstract, summary, hypothesis, observations, results, conclusions and recommendations — is treated with no tolerance.
4. Plagiarism and copyright
Plagiarism and copyright infringement overlap but are distinct. Plagiarism is an ethical wrong of non-attribution and may occur even with material out of copyright or with an idea, which copyright does not protect. Infringement is a legal wrong of unauthorised reproduction of protected expression, and may occur even with attribution. Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits fair dealing with a work for private or personal use, including research, and for criticism or review; attribution is part of fair practice. The author’s moral right to claim authorship (section 57) is the copyright analogue of the duty not to plagiarise.
5. Research ethics: the general principles
The modern codes grew out of abuse. The Nuremberg Code (1947), framed after the trial of Nazi doctors, made the voluntary consent of the human subject absolutely essential. The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki (1964, revised several times) extended this to medical research generally. The American Belmont Report (1979) stated three principles that now organise social research ethics:
- respect for persons: autonomy and informed consent, and protection for those with diminished autonomy;
- beneficence: do no harm, and maximise benefit against risk;
- justice: fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of research.
In India, the ICMR’s National Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical and Health Research Involving Human Participants (2017) apply to health research and are often borrowed for socio-legal fieldwork.
6. Ethics in legal fieldwork
- Informed consent: respondents must know the purpose, the use, the risks and their right to refuse or withdraw. Consent from prisoners, detainees and employees must be free of pressure from those who control them.
- Privacy and confidentiality: anonymise respondents; store data securely; do not disclose identities without consent. In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, 2017 INSC 801, the Supreme Court recognised informational privacy as part of the right to privacy; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 now governs the processing of digital personal data, and researchers handling such data must work within it.
- Protection of victims and children: the law prohibits disclosure of the identity of victims of sexual offences and of children in conflict with law; research reports must respect this.
- Avoiding harm: no deception that harms; care with traumatic subjects; no exposure of respondents to legal risk by recording admissions of crime without safeguards.
- Mental privacy: in Selvi v. State of Karnataka (Supreme Court, 2010) the Court held that narco-analysis, polygraph and brain-mapping tests cannot be administered without consent, since they intrude on mental privacy and the right against self-incrimination. The principle that a person’s mind cannot be probed without consent applies with greater force to research.
- Honesty in data: no fabrication (inventing data), falsification (manipulating data or omitting inconvenient results) or plagiarism. Together these three are the core forms of research misconduct.
- Ethics committee approval: universities increasingly require approval of fieldwork involving human participants.
- Authorship and acknowledgement: only those who contributed substantially are authors; assistance and funding are disclosed; conflicts of interest are declared.
Robert Merton (1942) described the norms of science as communism (common ownership of findings), universalism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism. Plagiarism and fabrication violate all four.
How this is examined
For a short note on plagiarism: meaning and forms, the UGC 2018 Regulations with the table of levels, the faculty penalties in a line, and the criticism of percentage tests. For an essay on research ethics, use the Belmont principles and the eight points in section 6, citing Puttaswamy and Selvi.
Now try the real questions: Research Methodology past question papers.