Perceptions of students and researchers of food technology towards plagiarism

The pandemic of plagiarism, which is wide-spread all over the world, is incredibly common among the generation of students of secondary, higher secondary and university education.The present study investigates the level of awareness of plagiarism among food technology students in India and to understand their perceptions towards academic dishonesty and reasons behind indulgence in plagiarism. A structured questionnaire was administered to the students and researchers of the National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management (NIFTEM) in India. The findings of the study reveals that 18 per cent, 57.8 per cent and 11.8 per cent of the students are extremely aware, moderately aware and somewhat aware that what constitutes plagiarism and what does not. Most of the respondents believe copying from a publication/book without crediting the source/author is plagiarism (Mean=4.318, SD=1.0041) and plagiarism as stealing (Mean=4.024, SD=.9126). It is also found that busy schedule (Mean=3.67), easy accessibility of electronic resources (Mean=3.69), unwareness of plagiarism instructions (Mean=3.6), poor knowledge of research writing (Mean=3.95) and lack of penalty (Mean=3.4) are the perceived reasons of indulging in plagiarism by the students and research scholars, hence, conducting orientation programmes and workshops on academic integrity, scholarly writings and referencing styles could be helpful in discouraging plagiarism in academic writing among students.