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FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK

My dear readers of Journal of Extension Education,

‘If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research’

This witty remark has been attributed to Wilson Mizner, the American playwright.

 

Of late, we have been witnessing a rise in cases of plagiarism (the practice of taking someone else’s work or idea and passing them as one’s own), predominantly in the research work of disciplines such as natural sciences. The proliferation of predatory journals and conferences has been said to be a major factor in the rise in such cases. In a shocking revelation, Shen & Bjork (2015) had found that Indian academics have contributed 35% of all articles published in various kinds of fake journals between 2010 and 2014.

 

In order to curb plagiarism, the UGC (University Grants Commission) had come out with UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Educational Institutions) regulations, 2018 and a publication entitled “Academic Integrity and Research Quality” during 2021, which lists out the various forms of aberrations in research misconduct, given below.

·            Fabrication - means making up or cooking up data or results without performing due experiments and reporting them in presentations/publications. Fabricated results are not based on the actual authentic data.

·            Falsification - means the experiments are performed but the outcome of the experimentation is manipulated. It is manipulation of research materials, equipment, processes, and modifying or omitting of data results in such a way that the research is not accurately represented in the research records.

·            Plagiarism - is appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit where it is due. It is presentation of someone else’s research plan, manuscript, article or text or parts thereof as one’s own. It is illicit presentation or use of an original research idea, plan or finding disclosed to someone in confidence under one’s own name, for example, taking the research idea, text or plan from the manuscript submitted for peer reviewing process for the purpose of evaluation, or from already published work.

I request all JEE readers to go through our journal’s Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement, which contains the plagiarism policy (Available at : https://www.extensioneducation.org/index.php/jee/ethics ).

Plagiarism is an important topic which every extension professional need to know, in detail.

We will be sharing a few thoughts about plagiarism in our forthcoming JEE issues as well.

 

This issue of JEE has papers on topics such as roles of Farmer Producer Companies, entrepreneurial attributes of floriculture farmers and on content analysis of social media channels involved in agricultural extension viz., YouTube videos and Facebook groups. Do send your feedback on these papers to editorextension@gmail.com.

 

D Puthira Prathap

Chief Editor

JEE 34 (4)