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Research ethics dilemma in higher education: Impact of internet access, ethical controls, and teaching factors on student plagiarism

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Abstract

This quantitative research study explores the external factors of plagiarism among university students in Pakistan. Data were collected from Islamabad city-based university students using an on-line survey that contains questions related to students’ plagiarism, from the internet access, ethical control, and teaching factors. For this research, we used a snowball sampling technique for data collection. We received 170 useable responses out of 180 distributed. A hierarchical regression analyses technique was performed for testing the relative contributions of gender, program level, field of study, enrollment status, mode of delivery, internet access, ethical controls, and teaching factors on the prediction of plagiarism. Though statistically analyzed results of this study suggest that internet access has a negative association with students’ plagiarism, ethics control and teaching factors have a positive association. These findings imply that culture and personal factors have an essential role in strict implementation of rules and creating awareness on the importance of preventing student’s involvement in plagiarism.

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Data Availability

All data are available from Asad Abbas.

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Acknowledgements

We express sincere appreciation to those students who took their precious time and participate in the online survey. The second author (Anam Fatima) would like to express gratitude to the Chinese government for awarding China Scholarship Council (CSC) Master’s scholarship at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), China. The authors would like to acknowledge the technical support of Writing Lab, Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in the production of this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Writing Lab, Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, NL, 64849, Mexico

    Asad Abbas, Arturo Arrona-Palacios & Samira Hosseini

  2. School of Public Affairs, University of Science and Technology of China, No. 96 JinZhai Road, Hefei, 230026, China

    Anam Fatima

  3. Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

    Hussein Haruna

  4. School of Engineering and Sciences, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey, NL, 64849, Mexico

    Samira Hosseini

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Contributions

Asad Abbas: Conception, survey design, formal data analysis, methodology, writing – final draft, revisions, and editing, project administration. Anam Fatima: Conception, data collection, data scrutiny, pilot study, writing – initial draft. Arturo Arrona-Palacios: Data analysis, writing. Hussein Haruna: Validation, writing – review, comments, and editing. Samira Hosseini: Writing—review, comments, and editing.

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Correspondence to Samira Hosseini.

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Abbas, A., Fatima, A., Arrona-Palacios, A. et al. Research ethics dilemma in higher education: Impact of internet access, ethical controls, and teaching factors on student plagiarism. Educ Inf Technol 26, 6109–6121 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10595-z

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