Awareness of plagiarism: Adaption, validity, and reliability of questionnaires in Iranian medical sciences for post-graduate students.

Abstract

Background: Academic plagiarism affects the ethical aspects of research and can be in relation with valid health information distribution. The aim of this research is designing, validating, and standardizing the plagiarism awareness questionnaire for awareness of plagiarism.

Materials and methods: This study is cross-sectional and was done in medical sciences post-graduate students. Adaption, validity, and reliability were done. The validation population were 11 experts (one linguistics and ten medical library and information sciences). The reliability population includes 333 post-graduate students in Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences in 2022. Cultural adaption, face and content validity, reliability (exploratory and confirmed factor analysis), and correlation (Pearson coefficient) were checked using SPSS and Amos software ver24.

Results: Cultural adaption was confirmed based on the experts' viewpoint using translation and re-translation. The CVR was 0.81, and content validity was confirmed. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted for a model with six factors and 30 items. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed a model with six factors and 28 items (items 3 and 29 were removed). Cronbach's alpha was 0.86. The plagiarism awareness model (PAM) has six factors, "authenticating", "citing", "understanding", "insight", "paraphrasing", and "attitude", which can explain 54.353% of variances. IFI = 0.759, CFI = 0.755, NFI = 0.717, AGFI = 0.789, GFI = 0.826, and RMSEA = 0.073, and the PAM model was confirmed. The results of Pearson correlation showed a significant correlation between all factors.

Conclusion: The PAM model has six factors and 28 items and was confirmed for plagiarism awareness study. This model can be considered by managers and can be used in health promotion research studies.

Paper type: Research Article.