How to Avoid Plagiarism in Your Work
by Naina Goel (After iGEM Policy Committee) and Peter Carr (iGEM Director of Judging)
Naina and Peter also gave a session on this topic at iGEM’s 2020 Opening Weekend Festival (YouTube)(Bilibili)
At iGEM, it is important to give credit where credit is due. Indeed, integrity, honesty and respect are among the iGEM values that all teams are expected to uphold. In this post, we will focus on how to avoid plagiarism in your work by giving examples of how to give credit to others who have inspired and contributed to your iGEM projects.
Plagiarism in general
Plagiarism is the act of presenting words, research work, measurement, images, graphs, sounds or expressions of others as your own. For example, copying even a single line from Wikipedia without crediting the source is plagiarism.
Image from https://medium.com/shock-media/cut-copy-paste-9af86010f4e9
Why, you may ask, is plagiarism wrong? Well, think of how you may feel if someone were to take your creative work and present it as their own. You would probably feel badly that you were not credited. It’s very easy to copy someone’s work, but it is a great deal more difficult to create the work in the first place. Taking someone else’s work and presenting it as your own denies the owner of the work the credit that is their due. For this reason, plagiarism is bad for society.
There is no valid excuse for plagiarism. You may think that everyone does it, or that you can save time, or that it’s ok if you don’t get caught, or that you can copy without giving credit because it is open source, or that you are only copying one thing and so it doesn’t matter, or that the work is too boring, or that the iGEM judges are expecting too much, or any number of other excuses. None of these excuses justifies plagiarism.
When copying work from others, you must attribute the work to those who created it. Remember that iGEM is an international competition. Your team, like many teams from all over world, probably want your iGEM project to be perfect. But that does not mean that you can take others’ work for your wiki, or others’ work for your BioBricks, or others’ graphs for your data.
There are serious consequences for plagiarism, including
– Permanent or temporary expulsion
– Legal repercussions
– Monetary repercussions
– Destroyed academic or professional achievement
And there are many high profile examples of people who have been guilty of plagiarism and suffered the consequences (for example, check out the story of Jaysen Blair in the documentary film A Fragile Trust).
Plagiarism from the iGEM perspective
Within iGEM, there plagiarism spectrum that you can avoid by giving credit where credit is due. You can use or modify models or measurement techniques created by other iGEM teams, but be sure to give credit to those teams. In creating Biobricks, you are actually encouraged to build upon and improve the Biobricks created by other teams; just be sure to give credit to those teams. And the same goes for using text descriptions or images or other works created by other teams – give credit where credit is due.
Images from www.flaticon.com, http://www.ncbr.muni.cz/course_helikar_2018/
Consequences for plagiarism within iGEM include:
- No medal
- Disqualification
- Loss of reputation
- Monetary or legal repercussions
- Permanent or temporary participatory ban
Key to avoiding plagiarism is attribution – the act of ascribing other’s words, research work, measurements, images, graphs, sounds or expression through citations, credits and warm thanks. The iGEM wiki includes a special section for attribution, which gives you an opportunity to explain what parts of your project you did and what was done by technicians, advisors, etc. The attribution section on your iGEM wiki is not the space for listing literature references – these can and should be displayed throughout your wiki.
To help you avoid plagiarism, here are some points to ponder while working on your iGEM project:
- Familiarize yourself with the process of research, particularly research that is open.
- Notice how these research works give proper documentation.
- When putting together presentations on your work, be generous in giving credit to others.
- If you are unsure about when or how to give credit, ask your mentor or instructor.
Plagiarism and the iGEM Values
The iGEM Responsible Conduct Committee (RCC) is called in when there is a serious concern that somebody is not displaying the iGEM values. In the context of plagiarism, it is particularly important to focus on the iGEM value of “Respect”. If you choose to use others’ work and represent it as your own, you not only are showing disrespect for other people, you also are disrespecting yourself because you are not giving yourself the best shot at showing who you are and what you are able to do.
Plagiarism can be done very intentionally, or it can be a result of being sloppy and cutting corners. If you are using something that comes from somewhere else, try to find a way to give credit for where that comes from. You don’t want the make the big mistake of giving the judges the impression that you are holding out someone else’s work as you own. It may be by accident that you fail to credit someone else’s work, but avoiding plagiarism is still your responsibility.
Tip!
Leave yourself enough time to make sure that you’ve credited everyone who deserves credit. On the attributions section of your wiki, make sure it is clear who did what on your iGEM project. Image credits, text quotations, and literature resources should not be listed in the attributions section, but instead should be placed throughout your wiki where those images, text quotations, and references are used.
At iGEM, we want to focus on what you – the iGEM teams – have done and have accomplished, which is usually a tremendous amount and very impressive. The iGEM judges are usually pretty good at spotting plagiarism, and so there is a high probability that if you make an unfortunate choice or are careless, that plagiarism will be spotted.
It is up to the iGEM judges to decide how to address and examples of plagiarism that they find. If it is a small mistake, then the judges may simply tell the team about it and make sure they correct it. If the plagiarism is significant and the team appears to be presenting someone else’s work as their own, then that is considered serious cheating and may be referred to and handled by the iGEM RCC.
In closing, on behalf of the After iGEM Policy Committee and the iGEM Executive Judging Committee, we thank you for taking the time to learn about plagiarism and wish you much success in your iGEM projects!
