Navigating Academic Integrity: Postgraduate Students' Awareness of Plagiarism and the Library's Preventive Role

Abstract

Academic integrity forms the cornerstone of ethical scholarship, ensuring the credibility and trustworthiness of the academic endeavor. Academic dishonesty encompasses a range of behaviors, including plagiarism, cheating, fabricating data, and unauthorized collaboration. This study therefore focused on plagiarism as a form of academic dishonesty. Plagiarism takes various forms, ranging from verbatim copying without proper citation to subtle paraphrasing without acknowledging the original source. This paper looks at the influence between postgraduate students' awareness of plagiarism and academic integrity and the role of academic libraries in deterring plagiarism and postgraduate academic integrity. The study adopted descriptive research design with both quantitative and qualitative data. It targeted postgraduate students (678) and library staff (3) in 3 public universities. The study found potential disconnection in plagiarism awareness between student self-perception and observed behaviors. The library plays a noticeably important role of generating research trust and academic integrity among postgraduate students. It concluded that there is a big gap between postgraduate students’ self-perceived understanding of plagiarism and their actual application of academic integrity; that students recognize and trust librarians' expertise in plagiarism prevention and appreciate the effectiveness of plagiarism detection software.