PU amends norms to check plagiarism in PhD theses

Bhartesh Singh Thakur

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 24

Panjab University (PU) ,Chandigarh, has brought an amendment to the PhD guidelines and has introduced filters to check plagiarism, while submitting the PhD thesis and MPhil dissertation, on Tuesday.

Plagiarism is defined as when a person copies a work of another author. It represents the violation of copyright law. Regarding interpreting Turnitin Originality Report for PhD thesis, which checks plagiarism, the filters should be set in to exclude matched less than 10 words in continuity. Earlier, matched seven words were allowed in continuity.

The generic terms, laws, standard symbols and standard equations will also be excluded. The ‘research methodology is to be excluded/ignored if quoted with proper references/footnotes,’ said the amendment, notified on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the rest of conditions remain same while evaluating similarity.

The quotes will be excluded but they need to be acknowledged, and bibliography, references and footnotes will also not be considered for similarity.

Also, similarity with self-published work in journals or conference proceedings is to be excluded from the analysis. This has to be clarified by a supervisor and a note to this effect be added along with similarity report. The overall similarity index up to 20 per cent is acceptable after using filters.

The Turnitin Originality Report should be certified by a supervisor and countersigned by the chairperson. The record of Turnitin Originality Report of the candidate has to be maintained in the office of the nodal department.

For MPhil thesis, a certificate specifying the percentage of similarity has to be submitted. Any prior submission of work from thesis of the candidate to Turnitin database unknowingly will be excluded from the originality report.

Penalty in case a paper is plagiarised

• If a research paper, which is more than 20% plagiarised, is submitted for PU journals, authors will be asked to write a formal letter of apology to the writers of the plagiarised paper, including an admission of plagiarism. 
• If the plagiarism is over 50%, prohibition against all authors for any new submissions to any journal published either individually or in combination with other authors of the manuscript, as well as in combination with any other authors, is recommended. They will not be allowed to serve on editorial board of PU journal. 

‘Language depts should devise mechanism’

For subjects of Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit and Urdu where Turnitin Originality Reports system doesn’t function, these departments should devise their own mechanisms to check the plagiarism,” said the amendment in PhD guidelines on Tuesday.