Framing Ethics and Plagiarism in Medical Research Writing and Publishing

Book excerpt: As scientific knowledge is continually refreshed by new experiments and theoretical insights and openly communicated to the medical community, upholding the academic integrity of scientific publishing is a key ethical issue in medical research. Academic integrity does not just involve commitment to a moral code or ethical policy, it is also about adherence to a set of values that avoid plagiarism and support trustworthy, fair, and honest behaviour in medical research and publishing, thus ensuring that knowledge dissemination proceeds unhampered. However, plagiarism is often framed in narrow, judgmental terms that leave little room for doctors and researchers to understand its complexities and consequences, made all the more complicated by the increasing use of the internet as a research space. This book provides an extensive exploration of ethics and plagiarism, helping its readership to understand how and to what extent the language-and-text processing components of medical discourse can and should be scrutinized across the genres that matter to scientific medical research writing practices and publishing.